Extraordinary Love

“We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.” ~ Jean Vanier

Tonight I listened to Stephanie Staples’ radio program, Your Life Unlimited. She had seen my post on Facebook on the fundraising dinner for Natasha’s Home last week and her interest was peaked. Natasha’s Home is a refuge for women who are trafficked. Natasha is the name of every trafficked girl—her identity is stolen and destroyed as she becomes entrenched in a system that strips her of living her life unlimited. This hit me for the first time listening to Stephanie’s program tonight.

How many of us choose to live our lives severely limited? These females have that choice violently removed from them. Forced to work in the sex trade or garment industry primarily, they are kept behind locked doors, beaten, drugged, raped, and/or threatened. They do not have freedom. Sometimes they barely survive their ordeal. There is a reason that human trafficking is referred to as modern day slavery. Some of these people are kept shackled to beds. We must act to end this phenomenon. Stephanie asked the question a couple of times: What can we do?

She admitted to being guilty of behaving like a suburban ostrich with her head in the sand and wanted to be open to changing that. Good for Stephanie! Some advice was cutting—do not just drive by the girls on the street. Call the police when you see something that looks suspicious. Children as young as twelve are being pulled into sex rings. It does not just happen in the North End of this city, though we hear more of that type of disappearance and those are the bodies that tend to turn up. Tonight we heard about a girl who was trafficked to Los Angeles from Ottawa. She could have been my goddaughter. She could have been your sister.

I remember working alongside Linda Fuller, the wife of the founder of Habitat for Humanity International here one summer and unlike the American cities they were used to building in, Winnipeg did not sanitize the neighbourhood. The young prostitutes working in the ‘hood shocked the Americans who had come up for the build. I could not believe that they had not seen it in their cities, having lived in two large American centres myself, and had been propositioned myself a number of times in both. In fact, I could well have been a trafficked woman if not for my guardian angel and some swift thinking on my part when a pimp scanning young women arriving in his city approached me. We can all hide our heads in the sand.

Or we have a better option: We can do ordinary things with extraordinary love. I suspect that is the love demanded here. The dark side of this world turned MP Joy Smith’s son’s hair grey in the blink of an eye. He literally aged working as a police officer trying to save these girls. See Joy's webpage ( http://www.joysmith.ca/main.asp?cat_ID=27 ) for information on how to help and to become more educated. The victims need our help; the families of missing girls and women need our support, and even the johns and pimps need us. The multi-national companies that buy girls to work in horrific conditions in their third world factories need us. The later two need us to say stop! Can you extend some extraordinary love in the direction of this issue? Educate yourself on sex trafficking and the garment industry atrocities. Stop human trafficking now!

Peace,

Suzanne