My Next Steps

You can tell a lot about a person by their Twitter.

If you look at who follows me and who I follow on Twitter, you will see a lot of organizations and individuals who have dedicated their lives to ending human trafficking and modern day slavery. By most estimates, there are 27 million people worldwide who are enslaved and sold for the purposes of sex or labour. Many of these people are trafficked because of dire poverty, drug addictions, or threats and coercion. The stories are heartbreaking, and no country or major city is exempt.

Despite the global nature of the problem, I wouldn’t have been able to define human trafficking a year and a half ago. One of the staff members of Power to Change challenged me in January 2012 to take a leadership role in planning our I Crave Freedom campaign by planning a movie night. When I started researching for it, I was blown away by what I learned.

Isaiah 1:17 says:

seek justice,

correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

    plead the widow's cause.  

God’s heart for the oppressed is clearly shown throughout the Bible (just type justice into Biblegateway.com and you’ll see what I mean). He calls us to take care of His people, especially those who can’t take care of themselves.

A line that further challenged me was from William Wilberforce, the leader of the British movement to end the slave trade. He famously said: “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

He was right. With that in mind, I have decided to stay in Ottawa next year to complete a one-year graduate certificate in Victimology, so that I will have some idea how to work with people who have been rescued from human trafficking. This program will open doors for me to take internships here or abroad to show people who have been oppressed for so long that somebody cares about them. That I care about them. And for now, that's what my life's going to be about.