I was on Rosie Radio with Rosie O'Donnell, and not only did I have a great time, but wow - Rosie's listeners really came through and supported Made By Survivors!  After the show we have our best sales ever, we had 12 new children sponsored for school, scores of party sign ups and a huge jump in our facebook and mailing lists.  So a big thanks to Rosie, her senior producer Deirdre and the entire crew.  If you missed the show - we put the interview to pictures and you can hear/watch it here:

Sarah Symons talks Human Trafficking on Rosie O'Donnell from john berger on Vimeo.

There are so many ways that people can use their unique gifts and experiences to fight slavery!  I am continually inspired by the creativity and diverse approaches that volunteers are bringing to this cause. One of the latest and coolest efforts - Warrior Divas: The Emancipation Network Project -  is dedicated to helping survivors of human trafficking through martial arts.

Thanks for taking the step of coming to our website after reading about me in REDBOOK Magazine.  I am truly honored to have been chosen as a REDBOOK hero!  I am a REDBOOK reader too, because I love how the magazine focuses not just on how women look but on the beauty that is inside each one of us.   Our survivors also possess deep inner beauty and courage, far greater than the damage and evil that has been done to them.  They are the true heroes of our organization, and I thank you for caring enough to want to help them. 

The quickest way you can help is to buy a survivor-made product, and spread the word every time you wear it.  You can also make a donation to help support our many programs - the Destiny center in Calcutta, our new jewelry program, the Freedom School for former quarry slaves, jobs and education programs for survivors in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Uganda and New York, clean water, aftercare and rescue.  Believe me, we stretch every dollar, re-use every box, and keep overhead costs in the US to an absolute minimum so that every donation can go where it is needed most - to help people get free from slavery and remain slavery-free through empowerment and education.

 “First you have to take them into your heart as your own child.  Then the strength comes out of you to protect them”   Anuradha Koirala.  

Anuradha  Koirala, founder of Maiti Nepal   (one of TENS partner shelters) has been nominated for a CNN Heroes Award, which she richly deserves to win – Anuradha is a true hero for our times.   I first met Anuradha in 2004, when I visited her  Kathmandu shelter along with Joe Collins and Brigitte Cazalis Collins of Friends of Maiti Nepal, the US arm of Maiti Nepal, with whom I volunteered for a year when I first became involved in anti-trafficking work.  This amazing trip changed my life forever. In fact, it was Anuradha who planted the seed for the creation of The Emancipation Network, when I asked her what kind of help she needed most at that moment. 

MEET OUR SURVIVORS AND INDIA STAFF - LEARN MORE ABOUT HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND HOW WE FIGHT IT:

Each year we make site visits and take a team of volunteers to work with survivors and high risk kids at our partner shelters. We assess programs, and offer therapeutic art project to kids, teens and adults, to build relationships and to learn more about their needs, hopes and dreams, so that we can provide continuing and meaningful services throughout the year.

It is hard to find words for everything I feel and all the wonderful and inspiring things that have happened this week. At the same time, it has sometimes been overwhelming, and some moments have been difficult to bear.  Most of the girls and children that we have been working with for the past few years are thriving – making a success out of lives that they could never have imagined - but there are a few that we have lost, or that in dire peril, and it is hard to come face to face with that reality.  We are doing everything in our power to intervene and help these individuals, and I am grateful to have the chance to try, but working on this issue, in this underworld, there are huge challenges.

On Monday morning, we began our 2 weeks of programming in Calcutta shelters and red light areas, starting with our very own Destiny girls.  After some very silly and hilarious icebreakers, we joined in a forum discussion about women’s rights,  comparing progress and continuing challenges in the women’s rights movements of each.  We talked about the fact that although the girls all consider America more progressive, we have yet to have a woman president or vice president, whereas India has had two women in the two highest offices.

 The girls felt that the biggest difference between Indian and American women is their confidence.  American women have more
confidence, they unanimously think, because we are allowed to make all kinds of decisions for ourselves – what to wear, where and how long to study, who to marry, where to live, if we work, and in what field.  In India, especially among the poor and in villages, male relatives make all these decisions.  Even Becky has to give her father’s name every time she wants to rent an apartment of get a cellphone or Internet connection.  Obviously, this systemic sexism is a huge factor in human
trafficking.  

Today we visited 10 of our school sponsored kids who have been placed in Ram Krishna Mission Boarding School.  It was absolutely amazing! The kids looked so good, so happy and healthy and clean, that I almost did not recognize them.  These girls, aged 6-13,  were all born into the Kidderpore red light community of Calcutta.   Their mothers were
trafficked as young girls into brothels, and are still working the streets, kept captive now by a complete lack of other options, and by the extreme stigma hanging like a cloud over the whole district.

 When the children lived at home, they shared a tiny room in the brothel with their mothers – it was a dangerous situation in the extreme, as there is always the risk that a client would tire of the mother and reach for her young daughter instead.  Our partner agency Apne Aap, which runs a prevention program in Kidderpore, eventually took these 10 girls into the night shelter because they were at especially high risk or had already been exploited.  The Emancipation Network began paying for their schooling three years ago and this past spring, they were enrolled in the Boarding School.

I’m writing this from the plane, en route to Calcutta, India, to participate in our annual volunteer trip, and to launch a whole new program which will train and eventually employ survivors as silversmiths, a highly respected and marketable trade.   We already sell a range of survivor-made jewelry on our website, but up to now, we’ve bought all the components, and the survivors have designed and assembled them into the finished pieces.  We’ve never before trained survivors to pound, bend, blowtorch, drill, rivet, melt and cast the metal into any shape and de

One of the first and biggest obstacles to overcoming modern slavery is the lack of public awareness and outcry.  If we found out there were people being kept as slaves in our own hometown, shouldn't we all drop everything to march in the streets and rush to rescue those people?  Oh, wait... there are slaves in many of our hometowns.  There are children working as slaves in factories and quarries and brothels and private homes and begging in the streets all over this global village - in many cases, these slaves are right out in the open for anyone to see.  So where is the public outcry?  Thanks to many heroic people around the world who have dropped everything else they were doing to respond to the emergency of slavery, the tide is beginning to turn. President Obama has just declared January to be 'National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month'