There are many unsolved issues in the world and there will always be. We live in an imperfect world and things go wrong in many ways. Accepting this simple truth doesn’t mean though to leave things as they are.
23 years ago, I was 17 years old, living in a closed society ruled by one party, one doctrine, one way of looking at life and the world at large. I hated it. Not because I was a teenager and I was ready to do things against mainstream in order to express my individuality. The vast majority, silent majority of Romanians hated it. I wasn’t the revolutionary type of teenager. I was not able to paint the walls, to make my voice heard one way or another, to publicly say that I do not agree with the system. Truth being told, 23 years ago, if you had voice, a different voice than the one of the ruling, communist party, then that voice was reduced to silence in a matter of hours. We were forced to march along the party lines, to buy and dress with the clothes that the party approved, to adhere to a set of routines that were imposed to you via psychological pressure. I remember that in the highschool, we were literally used as workforce in the agriculture. Two weeks, depending to the season, we were taken to state farms near our city and put to select the crops (corn, grapes, apples). All in the name of the state doctrine.
Freedom was a dangerous word. I was not able to say it, but inside me, I was dreaming it and hoping that one day I will experience the benefits of that word. That day came on the 22nd of December 1989. My country got rid of the communist doctrine and we all embraced the freedom and we all were embraced by the free world. The entire nation declared: we are free now, so we can take our faith in our hands.
Since then, I got used to take freedom for granted. Since I became free and the freedom under its many aspects was accepted and guaranteed by my country’s law (aligned to the rest of the world’s provisions of the law), I assumed that freedom exists for all of us. I took freedom for granted for 23 years. Since I was free, I assumed that everybody, or almost everybody was.
I was wrong, so wrong, in so many ways. I am not a naive or hypocrite – of course I knew from media reports about persons that were trafficked, forced into commercial sexual exploitation, forced to labour under harsh conditions or even worse, trafficked for organs. I treated thou those information as isolated facts and unfortunate happenings.
My perspective changed on month ago when I met a person that brough into the conversation the “freedom” word from many angles. That person made me recall the period of before 1989. That person made me acknowledge that taking freedom for granted is wrong. That person made me remember that freedom is the only thing there is in order to own the present and have a future.
Freedom is a benefit that is not evenly distributed to all of us, in spite of the provisions of the law in so many countries in Europe and around the World. There are people who abuse the freedom of act, speech and think and the freedom of the markets. These people engage in human trafficking and deny a birth right of any human being: to be free and to build its future as it desires.
Human trafficking is the illegal trade in human beings that forces them into slavery. Slavery is when one person completely controls another person, using violence to maintain that control, exploits them economically, pays them nothing and they cannot walk away. Anyone can be trafficked and there is no one typical profile of a victim of human trafficking. They may be well-educated or have no formal education. One factor that is common to victims is vulnerability. Victims may be vulnerable for many reasons, but in general because their immediate environment seems to provide little hope for their future with no opportunities for improvement. Instability and danger due to minimal educational opportunities, poverty, a violent or neglectful family situation are other reasons. These are factors which can result in “dreams of a better life elsewhere”, and from here, the distance from freedom to slavery is reduced to zero.
There are many things that a free person can do in order to help raising the awareness on human trafficking. I, personally, made a commitment to help and my tools are my skills to spread the word.
I love to write, I love to talk to people. What do you love to do?
Do you paint?
Do you write as well?
Do you dance?
Do you run?
Do you act?
Do you cook?
No matter what your talent, skills or passions might be, they will be of help. Come back on this blog and soon we will join our forces with amazing people and organisations, governmental or non-governmental, in order to fight against human trafficking and free people from modern slavery. The ultimate purpose: protect freedom and the future.
Do you take freedom for granted? Think again!
Photo credit: good-wallpapers.com