Trade

Last night David and I watched teh movie TRADE. (You can get it at Blockbuster)This is one of those movies I did not want to see but I made myself. (Like Blood Diamond) There are movies out there that I feel are important for people to see because they open our eyes to what is really going on in the world. And this one was hard. (SIDE NOTE_ Do not watch this movie when your kids are around, kids must be fast asleep before viewing.) It is basically about a girkl who get's klidnapped in Mexico City and is forced into the sex trade, all the while her brother is trying to rescue her.

The practice of slavery in the US is something most people think ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865, but in recent years it has returned in an even more
virulent form. Fueled by the collapse of the Soviet Union and other eastern
European countries, new technologies like the internet, and sieve-like borders,
the traffic in human beings has become an epidemic of colossal dimensions. The
State Department estimates that as many as 800,000 people are trafficked over
international frontiers each year, largely for sexual exploitation. Eighty
percent are female and over fifty percent are minors. Many people in this
country push this atrocity out of their minds, believing that it only occurs in
faraway countries like Thailand, Cambodia, the Ukraine and Bosnia. The truth is
that the United States has become a large-scale importer of sex slaves. Free the
Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization estimates that at least
10,000 people a year are smuggled or duped into this country by sex
traffickers.

The enormity of what is really going on is so huge and so unfathomable that when
the movie is finished you don't really know what to do.

So go watch the movie and then come back and click on these links to help:

http://www.fighttrafficking.org/ this is my friends the Orranges, they have commited their lives to erradicating slavery.

Plus everyone should know about the Craig's List Campaign. This is the same organization we all helped out for Valentine's Day. (And if you missed that post, it's not to late.)

Anti-Slavery International - http://www.antislavery.org/
Anti-Slavery International, founded in 1839, is the world's oldest international human rights organization and the only charity in the United Kingdom to work exclusively against slavery and related abuses. They work at local, national and international levels to eliminate the system of slavery around the world.

Get the word out. Once you are aware of a problem, keeping silent only makes you become part of the problem.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"

"Yes, I see the church as the body of CHrist. But, oh! How we have blemished and scared that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists."

"We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for teh evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

_Martin Luther King Jr.