My friend Julie introduced me to Naomi Zacharias (the famous evangelist Ravi Zacharias's daughter) and her ministry, Wellspring International, which is part of her father's ministry group. On Zoom, Julie and I watched an interview with Naomi Zacharias and I was really touched by her heart for exploited women and children, especially in the area of sex trafficking. Here's the interview if you are interested. It's from 2017, so maybe the statistics are slightly different now, but overall, from what I've read recently, the human trafficking industry is still going strong, unfortunately. If anything, it's probably worse.
Naomi said that overall the trafficking industry is worth $150 billion per year, with sex trafficking making up about $99 billion of that! Whoa. As I've read before, she talked about how hard it is for folks to escape from this prison of abuse, especially as they are sometimes in foreign countries, their passports are held, and their families back home are threatened (including their children if they have them). There are language issues, their spirits are broken down, and they are sometimes targeted by traffickers for up to two years before they are finally trapped. There is psychological manipulation, gifts and compliments given, and the women and girls (and sometimes boys) are made to feel loved and accepted. They think the trafficker is their boyfriend who will take care of them, but they end up trapped and sometimes even branded (literally, with a tattoo so that other traffickers will know that she "belongs" to another trafficker).
Naomi said that our role is to reflect and share the love that we have received ourselves. The Lord can bring beauty out of this horrible situation, and there are women now who Wellspring International has helped with rescue and funding who are now working as top chefs and in other fields. But it's a long process of recovery.
After I saw the interview and heard about Naomi's book, The Scent of Water, I read it in about two days. I think the best part was the real stories of women who have been saved from trafficking and who now value themselves and know they are infinitely loved and worthy. The hard part of the book was that these stories were interwoven with Naomi's own story of learning her own worth after a terrible divorce, but I felt that it needed some heavier editing to help these mesh and flow a bit better. I still would recommend the book to anyone interested in human trafficking and human stories--Naomi is a great, and sometimes poetic, storyteller.
My Zoom with Julie wasn't the only one I've had related to human trafficking recently. Our Saturday-night prayer-walking group was able to meet on Zoom a couple weekends ago (sorry, no photo!) and we had a wonderful time sharing and praying together. It was mostly about our personal stories and struggles with the pandemic lockdown, but near the end we had a bit of time to talk about and pray for trafficking in Kanazawa. The entertainment area in Kanazawa, from what I've heard, has really slowed down and gotten much quieter during this time, so I hope that this means girls are safer, but that might not necessarily be the case. I saw a video on the BBC about men still paying for prostitutes even during this pandemic, so apparently some people are willing to risk COVID-19 for this. And so we keep praying for hearts to change, addictions to be healed, and people to find freedom.
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