Anita [Victim Testimony #5]

[(from The Protection Project)

"My name is Anita Sharma Bhattarai. I am 28 years old. I am from Nepal. …On November 22, last year, I boarded the bus in order to go pay for my vegetables. I sat next to a Nepali man and woman. They offered me a banana to eat and I took it. Soon after I ate the banana, while I was still on the bus, I got a very bad headache. I told the man and woman that I had a headache and they offered me a pill and a bottle of mineral water to help me swallow the medicine. Immediately, I felt myself becoming groggy and then I fell unconscious.

The next thing that I remember is waking up in the train station in Gorakhpur, India.

...The man told me not to cry out. He informed me that there were drugs (hashish) tied around my waist and that I had just smuggled them across an international border. He told me that if I brought the attention of the police, I would be in trouble …I could feel plastic bags under my dress.

…When we got to Bombay, he told …that I would have to go to his friend’s house and wait while he got us some money. She was a Nepali woman. She said her name was Renu Lama. I left the train station with Renu Lama.

…When we arrived at her house, Renu Lama told me that I should take a bath…[she] gave me some of her old clothes to wear... I felt very scared that evening and I refused to eat anything. I soon noticed that many men were coming in and out of the house and I realized it was a brothel. I began howling and shouting. I said that I wanted to leave. Renu Lama…said that I had been bought and I would have to work as a prostitute in order to pay them back… I cried a lot…

The next day, though, I insisted that I wanted to leave. The women began to slap me on the face. They cut off my hair. It was shoulder length in the back with short bangs in the front. Now that I had short hair, I knew that I could not leave the brothel without everyone identifying me as a prostitute. In my culture, short hair is the sign of a wild woman.

Human Trafficking: Know More

Sold - by Patricia Mccormick

Lakshmi, 13, knows nothing about the world beyond her village shack in the Himalayas of Nepal, and when her family loses the little it has in a monsoon, she grabs a chance to work as a maid in the city so she can send money back home. What she doesn't know is that her stepfather has sold her into prostitution. She ends up in a brothel far across the border in the slums of Calcutta, locked up, beaten, starved, drugged, raped, "torn and bleeding," until she submits. In beautiful clear prose and free verse that remains true to the child's viewpoint, first-person, present-tense vignettes fill in Lakshmi's story. The brutality and cruelty are ever present ("I have been beaten here, / locked away, / violated a hundred times / and a hundred times more"), but not sensationalized. An unexpected act of kindness is heartbreaking ("I do not know a word / big enough to hold my sadness"). One haunting chapter brings home the truth of "Two Worlds": the workers love watching The Bold and the Beautifulon TV though in the real world, the world they know, a desperate prostitute may be approached to sell her own child. An unforgettable account of sexual slavery as it exists now. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Maya's Story [Victim Testimony #3]

(from “Rape for Profit,” by Human Rights Watch Asia, 1995)

"Maya" is from a small village in Nuwakot district. She was married to a man from a nearby village when she was around thirteen.

…In 1990 a fellow villager began visiting the house. The second time he came to visit, he brought another man along. They invited Maya and her husband to come out to see a movie. Maya’s husband told her to go ahead without him. The three of them boarded a bus, which Maya said kept going farther and farther from Kathmandu. Eventually, they went through the border at Kakarvitta. They were never stopped or questioned by the police.

Not Sold but Stolen [Victim Testimony #2]

from Shared Hope International

Gina was a young child -- only nine years old -- living with her family in a small village in Nepal. Gina wasn't sold. She was stolen.

Drugged with a "sweet drink" by a friend, Gina awoke on a train – never to see her family again. When Gina arrived in Bombay after a three-day journey, she remembers being grabbed by the hand, rushed down a crowded street through "a sea of legs" to a dingy brothel. They put makeup on her face and then the "seasoning" process began.

Prayer Requests for THN [Border Monitoring]

"And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him." - 1 John 5:14-15

Prayer Request for Border Monitoring: Till now, we have not been able to get any convictions against traffickers, or even have any cases go to trial.  We have recently put together a legal strategy (with help from some amazing people) that is being launched in the coming week, and we are hoping for success in prosecuting traffickers.  Pray that we can successfully prosecute traffickers, so that they will be stopped from trafficking in the future, and others will be deterred from acting as traffickers.

She Hoped to Become a Film Star [Victim Testimony #1]

(from “The Rape of 100,000 Girls,” by Helen Brown)

Seema had left the poverty of her home village to work in Kathmandu. She was barely twelve when a smooth-talking flesh trader lured her to Bombay with talk of a better job. She hoped to become a film star. Instead she was sold into a brothel.

At first she resisted, screaming, crying and fighting off prospective customers, but the madam who ran the brothel would have none of it. She sent in a muscled toughie to hold the girl down while an old man raped her. The pain was so intense that Seema lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized for a week. After that it was back to the brothel where the other child prostitutes told her she could not win this battle.