Before an expansive view of Rocinha, São Conrado and the Atlantic Ocean, tour guide Zezinho da Silva explains the finer points of Rocinha's urban geography to Canadian tourists Archie and Lorna.

Like the acute clarity that follows an unexpected blow to the face, the weight of these conclusions left me pensive and restless on the ten-hour overnight flight to Rio de Janeiro. Somewhere over Bermuda, I re-read Kennedy Odede’s New York Times opinion piece on slum tourism in his native Kibera, Kenya, and I couldn’t help noticing how his thesis resonated with my own frustration. “Slums will not go away because a few dozen Americans or Europeans spent a morning walking around them.” Odede continues, “Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something—and then go back to their lives…”

As our flight pierced a quintessentially-carioca partly cloudy sky, this notion of poverty as entertainment simultaneously sickened, convicted and excited me. What kind of twisted individual is willing to exploit another’s poverty for his own pleasure? I had to meet these sickos.

****

As the cramped van full of tourists—cameras and guide books in hand—snaked through the equally confined streets of Rocinha, the largest slum (Portuguese: favela) in South America, I introduced myself to my fellow slum tourists.

In a tiny Rocinha beco (alleyway), tour guide Zezinho da Silva takes a moment to explain the dynamics of gang warfare to his group.

On my right sat Kim, a freelance writer and photographer from California. To my left was Tom, the marketing director from Tokyo, and behind us were Alex and Jen the writer and TV producer from London, and Archie and Lorna, an interracial retired Canadian couple from the Baby Boomer set. Hmm, these aren’t quite the “Ugly Americans” I expected to meet on an exploitative excursion into the favelas.

Our guide for the tour was Zezinho, who prefers to call his trips a “favela experience,” the aim of which is to “destroy misconceptions.” Born in Rocinha but raised in New York City’s Queens borough, Zezinho is a passionate proponent of slum tourism, yet also seems aware of its potential ethical pitfalls—he warned us against snapping photos of residents without permission as “people don’t like to feel like zoo animals.”

Yet Zezinho didn’t hesitate to highlight the drama inherent in a daylong tour through territory controlled by the notorious Amigos dos Amigos drug-trafficking gang. “Now I’m going to use some code words,” Zezinho whispered, as the team listened with rapt attention. “The traffickers I’m going to refer to as ‘the guys,’ the drugs as ‘product’ and the selling points as… well, ‘selling points.’ And sometimes, you might see some ‘guys’ with ‘G-U-N-S’.”

I expected the next set of questions to center on concern for our personal safety, but what came next surprised me. Jen asked Zezinho whether former president Lula’s celebrated transfer programs were truly effective. Kim wanted to know whether or not “gay-bashing” was common in the favelas. Archie was interested in how favelados pay their property taxes.

***

While Odede admits “the expectation, among the visitors and the tour organizers is that the experience may lead the tourists to action once they get home,” he laments “it’s just as likely that a tour will come to nothing. After all, looking at conditions like those in Kibera is overwhelming, and I imagine many visitors think that merely bearing witness to such poverty is enough.”

Residents of the Vila Canoa favela enjoy immaculate computer facilities donated by the Microsoft Corporation.

I imagined the same, until I heard the story of another slum tourist by the name of Pope John Paul II. Upon visiting Vidigal, a favela situated between Ipanema Beach and Rocinha, in July 1980, the Pope was so moved by the favela residents’ resilience in the face of continued government-sanctioned destruction of their homes, that he removed a papal ring and donated it to the favelados. Soon after, John Paul II successfully advocated for the Brazilian government to amend their policy of forcible eviction, and today Vidigal’s luminescent presence on Ipanema Beach serves to remind Rio’s Zona Sul of the legitimacy of the favelados’ land ownership claims.

The residents of Rio’s favelas haven’t forgotten the Pope’s generosity, nor have they forgotten the generosity of other slum tourists who, after experiencing favela life firsthand, have decided that “merely bearing witness to such poverty” is not enough. Examples include the Microsoft executive who donated a computer education center to nearby Vila Canoas favela, and the countless individuals who’ve dedicated their entire lives to empowering the community by teaching English, and supporting occupation-specific educational initiatives.

Aurelio, an immigrant from Northeastern Brazil who steadfastly observes the prevailing men’s favela dress code of soccer shorts, Havaianas sandals, and no shirt, is one of those residents who relishes the opportunity to host tourists in his favela. “Tourism is great, we get to show our favela to the rest of the world, who might one day come to stay,” Aurelio exclaimed as he beamed at the group of now slightly-sunburned and wildly-inspired international tourists at whom I rolled my eyes upon first meeting.

And perhaps that’s where Mr. Odede and I had it wrong. We assumed that for others less accustomed to poverty, “merely bearing witness to such poverty is enough.” It turns out that it’s not. While many will witness injustice (via television, social media, or even slum tours) and choose to do nothing, there are some who upon witnessing such a profound need will dedicate their lives to meeting that need.  Slums will certainly not go away just because a few dozen Americans or Europeans spent a morning walking around them—the tour is only the beginning of the end.

To learn more about Rocinha, slum tourism, and Zezinho’s efforts to give back to the community, visit Zezinho’s blog at http://lifeinrocinha.blogspot.com/.

All photos by Jimmy Chalk.

1.     Choose one outfit to wear this Lent.

2.     Don’t buy any new clothes for seven weeks.

3.     Be creative. Prepare for resurrection.

This experiment with dressing simply is an attempt to live toward Christianity’s highest feast, the feast of Easter. It is an attempt to begin to pay gracious attention – to ourselves, our bodies, to others and their bodies, and to Creation. It’s not about heroics; it is about receiving the graciousness and generosity of God, the way the dust and mud of Eden received God’s breath, and the way a tree on a riverbank receives water and light and bears fruit. What would it look like to live in the generosity of God rather than in the guilt of our own failure? What would it mean to be free to notice that God is making the world new and that joining in that newness is a gift, and not a crushing burden?

Lent is seven weeks. The “one outfit” recommendation is flexible – this is a creative challenge. Perhaps wear the same pants and same shirt, or the same dress, but different scarves. What about jackets? Hats? Shoes? I’m not proposing no laundry for seven weeks; wash the clothes. I’m also not proposing that you go the gym in dress shoes, or sleep in jeans, or that you freeze during cold snaps and sweat through your shirt when it’s warm. What I am proposing is that we keep some significant part of our clothing stable in a way we wouldn’t normally. And then – from there – we can improvise. Maybe we can follow in the high Church tradition, in which Sundays don’t count as part of Lent. Sundays are the Lord’s Day and therefore they are always feast days, never fast days. Maybe we can wear one basic outfit, like a canvas, as a stable backdrop for a whole variety of appearances. Or maybe we keep one striking item constant, and let the rest of our clothing move around that fixed center.

Editor, philosopher, and teacher Gideon Strauss once said that clothing is an act of generosity toward other people. For him, I think this means sometimes wearing colors other than black. As I think of my own clothes-wearing practices, I wonder: have I ever considered my clothing in terms of generosity? What would that even mean? Clothes have had a lot of meanings for me. Over the years, the decision of what to wear has centered around my fear, around self-expression, hiding, guilt, or my desire to fit in. The labels in my shirts name me as a hopelessly privileged person – as an oppressor. Jeans sizes have at times felt like existential labels; the cut of them, or the brands, have been about proving I’m not one of those people, or that I am; clothes have been about proving that I know who I am, and that who I am is different but not freakish. Any part of embodied existence can become a physical language through which I must prove that I deserve to be alive.

What if, in wearing clothing, I were free to be generous? Generous to myself, to my own body, and free to begin uncoiling from my self-obsession? What if I were free not to think of what it says about me that my clothes were made in sweatshops, but instead to begin to think about the hands that made them, and consider the bodies and souls that go with those hands?

Jeff McSwain, who founded the Reality Center in downtown Durham, North Carolina, recently told me about his understanding of the difference between cooperation with God and participation. Cooperation, for him, means that God has done the lion’s share of the work, but that the tiny fragment we have to do is necessary; if we don’t do it, the world will be incomplete. No matter how small our part is, we can still fail horribly by not doing it. Participation, by contrast, means that we are invited to be involved with a God who makes space for us and for our creativity, but does not existentially depend on us. God is inviting us to work within the already-accomplished reality of creation and re-creation. We can be a meaningful part of the triumph, but we are incapable of causing ultimate failure. The Kingdom of God has come, and we live in it or deny it, but we can’t wreck it.

This is a claim that comes out of a deep, gracious theology of what it means for us to live in God’s creation and to work with God in restoring the world. Our work is real, and yet it is work within a reality that God has already brought into being. Participating with God is not about constructing new realities; it is about giving up on our denial of what is most deeply true. Participating with God does not mean inventing the kingdom of God. It means listening, and paying attention, and realizing that the kingdom of God is here, that it is real, that it is a place we can live, right now. God has made the world new in Christ. God has made us new. It is finished, and it will be completed.

And so this one-outfit idea is about giving in to reality. It is, for me, about reading the tags in my clothing rather than trying to forget that they say, Made in China, Indonesia, or the Philippines. It is about making a beginning with honesty, and trusting that God can show up. No: even more, it is about trusting that God has shown up.

Poet Mark Strand begins his poem “Keeping Things Whole” with the lines, “In a field / I am the absence / of field.” The poem follows the speaker moving through the world, understanding himself always as a negative, displacing presence. Everywhere, he is the absence of whatever was seamless until he came. The poem ends with the line, “I move / to keep things whole.”

This Lent, stop moving to keep things whole. Early in his Institutes, Calvin writes that the Spirit with “tender care supported the confused matter of heaven and earth until beauty and order were added” (1.13.22). Either that is what the Spirit is still doing, as God makes the broken world new in Christ, or we are desolate and beyond hope. In either case, we are not the ones making anything whole. Not by our pretense, our heroics, or anything we’ve ever done or ever will do.

In colder climates, Lent is the time of year when the bare ground slowly wakes up.  This is the premise, I think, of the “fasts” the church calendar encourages us to practice during the days of Lent. Fasting is not negation; it is the space of new green shoots, the bare ground unfreezing and growing fertile again. Luther, in writing of our life in Christ, draws on the biblical image of a tree. What we do in God, he says in “On the Freedom of the Christian,” is like the growth of a tree. And what we do without God is, by implication, as useless as trying to build a tree out of scrapwood. Another image Luther uses is of dry ground waiting for rain. We are like that ground: we can no more produce life than cracked mud can produce plants. But once the rain comes, all sorts of new life is possible.

So what if it’s true? What if God’s tenderness, drawing the tips of plants up out of the ground, is the deepest source of reality? What if that tenderness is where all true beauty and order have their source? Then we can pray for Egypt and Libya. We can pray for Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States and Mexico. We can pray for the L.A. police force. For AIDS victims in Uganda. We can pray for downtown Durham. We can go to these places, in thought, in spirit, in tears, in laughter, and in body. We can pray for ourselves, our families and churches, and the friendships and communities where much has died and is dying. We can pray in spite of words we can’t take back. We can pray in spite of cancer, in spite of divorce. We can live. We can die (protesting nonviolently among bombs, or sleeping in beds in a neighborhood from which you can’t hear bombs). We can die the small deaths of the everyday as well as the physical death of which Lent reminds us – a death that goes through the Cross, into the ground, and rises into a life that is truly life.

Wearing one outfit all of Lent is not going to answer all my questions about what I mean in this body, what this body means in the world, or how I might begin living faithfully toward other bodies. But this Lent, as I consider my wardrobe, I am going to practice living on the premise that when God looked at creation and said, “this is good,” that meant me too. It means me, and you, and billions of yous whose names I don’t know. I can groan with the waiting creation, rather than plugging my ears because that groaning makes me feel so guilty. God has something more to say to me than that I’ve failed, again, at living this resurrected life.

Let’s think of our one outfit as the garment in which Christ clothes us, our humanity made whole again. Then it can help us remember that we are free to stop pretending that we are anything other than dust held together by the breath of God.

Credit where it’s due: This idea was partly inspired by a story told of a woman at Ched Meyers’ Sabbath Economics conference last fall, who only buys one dress every twelve months, and partly by Gideon Strauss’s daughters Hannah and Tala, who, every October, “along with several hundred of their closest friends,” choose one dress and wear it for the month, for the sheer fun of it, a project previously chronicled in The Curator.

If you’d like to join me in the clothes adventure, drop me a line and we can embark together: stephanie.gehring@duke.edu. (If you find the whole project terminally intimidating but also attractive, drop me a line especially; I bet we can find some variation of it that will let you join us. That, in fact, is the whole idea – being exuberantly creative.) A version of this article also appears on Confessio, a student journal at Duke Divinity School.

I don’t mean to fly off the handle but
flying off…all the way to Pietermaritzburg,
conferencing in KwaZulu-land, and
there I was, driven past the hotel spikes
stuck up like some teenage hair-do,
the Golden Horse Casino Hotel venue
for poverty-reduction talk!—the foyer packed
with lottery dreaming seniors spinning slots.

My own motive’s not far off, whirling
words around an elegant Σ of squares
the total’s still the lust to win.  Golden
geese fly over the shanty poor, dark
horses hobbled in arrears.  High’s up;
now’s back; the distance done: my jackpot speech.

Coda*

Dressing the rich in rags is haute couture.
The chic wear slogans–rouge their eyes with kohl.
Meanwhile the ‘underprivileged’ barely endure.
Nobody goes broke working for the poor.

* I dedicate this poem to Wang An-Shi (1021–1086), the Chinese statesman who lived during the Sung dynasty when the state was impoverished by the need to pay tributes to invading barbarians. As a result radical reforms were demanded.  Wang An-shi, a poet and writer as well as a statesman, developed a program of far-reaching reforms. He abolished tax immunities of big landowners, ended forced labor on public works in favor of money payment, and instituted the buying and selling of essentials by the state.  These reforms were deliberately sabotaged by the civil servants and he was compelled to resign in 1076.

To some extent, my criticism missed the point. Yes, government money should be dedicated to the reform process. Yes, politicians should stop hiding behind legalese when determining what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. But the point I did not make — and the point I hope to make now — is that prison reform, like any other social reform, should not be left in the increasingly incompetent and untrustworthy hands of politicians. Inmates cannot be viewed as mere statistics for policy and legislation, nor as unforgivable sociopaths who deserve punishment more than they do reintegration. They need to be viewed as humans, not monsters. They need to be seen with sympathy, not fear. Most importantly, they, like any other human, need to experience love.

Loving that which we do not understand — and especially that which we fear — is a difficult hurdle for most people. We give our hearts to what we know, not because it is so much more lovable than anything else, but because it is safe, familiar, and essentially, non-threatening. Yet the only way we are able to come to know anything is through interaction and experience. Prisoners rarely have this privilege with the outside world. Many fell victim to crime in the first place because of a lack of healthy, substantive social connection, and keeping these victims — and yes, even criminals are victims — in isolation for so many years as a follow-up, all but guarantees that such a connection will never be made. Now more than ever it seems that we are content to “lock them up and throw away the key”. We are a culture hellbent on bandaging a wound without ever applying the ointment necessary for healing. For most people in any circumstances, that treatment begins with a simple ear to listen.

Enter Between The Bars, a project initiated by the Center for Future Civic Media, which is a collaboration of the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies. Between the Bars integrates handwritten letters with standard blogging technology to provide a platform for inmates to share their stories, thus hopefully establishing even the vaguest connection to the outside world. Inmates not only have their stories published, but readers can comment, tag, and even subscribe to RSS feeds on the blog. Inmates are then able to read responses from the public, thus maintaining interaction with the very society they one day hope to reenter. This bears more significance than it may seem at first glance because many inmates have no family, no friends, no visitors, and no correspondence with other human beings. They have, essentially, been forgotten.

This is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy faced by inmates. We think of them not as individuals with faces and names, but as a population, an inventory on a distant shelf lined up and numbered, some thrown into the streets after so many years, others set to expire. For many there is no hope left in this life, and for those who believe that this life is all there is, that is a terminal blow. To no longer be seen as a human being — to no longer be seen as a life– is to be denied the essence of our creation. Through ignorance and indifference, we deny the very life we claim to be protecting when we remove criminals from society.

But giving inmates the opportunity to reach us, the very people who have rejected them, can only be powerful if those people are willing to receive them. What is therapeutic for an inmate, what is truly rehabilitative and even redemptive, is for us to once more see them as human. A man convicted of murder is a monster until we understand his own brokenness — a brokenness that, even if embodied differently, we all share. Killing someone is horrible, but is the abuse, neglect, and violence so frequently suffered by the perpetrators of these crimes any less horrible? When we are able to see the poverty in other peoples’ lives, we are able to reconcile, sympathize, empathize, and most importantly, forgive. This is not some sentimental flower-child idealism stated without consideration for the complexities of this calling — I do not mean to minimize the pain and hardship of victims of crime. But one man’s pain does not justify the perpetuation of someone else’s. Crime can never be abolished by disregarding the criminal, but only by loving him, and there can be no love without forgiveness first.

To put it more practically, the prison population should not be seen as an offshoot of society, some extra class cast to the side as undesirables. They need to be seen as part of our society, as those who require our support instead of our contempt. Giving them access to share their lives through digital social media is both a massive and a minute step towards that integration. Once more, if we are able to see inmates as part of who we are collectively, we should find it easier to see their humanity, thus making it more likely that we will find our hearts changed enough to offer them the love that most of us have never had to go without.

Unfortunately, even a private project as necessary as Between The Bars has fallen prey to the imposed sovereignty of policy and procedure. As of December 16, 2010,  the site and all of its archived content has been shut down until further notice, citing administrative issues. Whether due to lack of funding, insufficient manpower, or the treachery of political agenda, we cannot say for sure, but for whatever conglomeration of reasons, the thin ray of sunlight that had briefly pierced the cold stone of this country’s prison walls has been, for the time being, stamped out once more. The blog staff hopes that the site will be back up and running again soon; perhaps even by the time this column is published. Until then, Between The Bars has done the indispensable service of reminding us that no matter the crime, no matter what wickedness mankind continues to demonstrate towards one another in haste or greed, in passion or pride, there is not one who should be denied the infallible, impenetrable, merciful sovereignty of love. That responsibility, of course, rests not with the government nor with the law, but with us.

Exiting the Quails, I was led up a stairway to an open meeting place. The victims were all gathered together in a large group, sitting on the floor and listening to instructions from the social workers who worked for the organization that had helped to rescue them. Small children clung to their mothers’ saris, and the men were gathered around one of the social workers, speaking Tamil. They had the deeply tanned complexion of rural workers who spend their days in the sun; most of the men had moustaches and wore lungis, a traditional southern Indian garment that resembles a long kilt. Most were likely from working castes, which are positions in Indian hierarchy based on the Hindu religion. Caste discrimination has been illegal in India since its independence, but it still subtly pervades much of society. It is people like these who are most often victims of human trafficking and modern slavery.

After everyone had eaten, I asked a social worker about interviewing one of the men. I’d been assigned by the NGO I work for to do an interview and thereafter prepare a short press release which would eventually be used to raise awareness among Indian government officials about forced labor. They led me to a young man named Achal. He was tall and handsome, and very articulate. Achal was 25 years old and had lived most of his life in a small village in Orissa. Over time, he found it difficult to support himself by working the land his family had farmed for generations. This is not uncommon; as India has developed economically, it has begun to shift from an agrarian to a service-based economy. Farmers increasingly find themselves unable to support their families by working their land alone, and large numbers are migrating to cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore. Achal was one of these workers, and he came to Bangalore and found work in a brick kiln, eventually bringing his young wife to help him with the work.

The owner of this particular brick kiln was from what is traditionally seen to be a higher caste. He also had many powerful friends in Bangalore. As Achal worked for the owner, he increasingly found his freedoms restricted, and his wages shrinking from what was originally promised. Then the physical abuse began.

As Achal told me his story, I could not help but cringe at parts. Achal had been forced by the owner to recruit other workers for the kiln by offering them small loans and then asking them to work to repay the debts. When these workers began being abused, they escaped from the facility during the night, and the owner held Achal accountable for their debts. He was eventually sent back to Orissa without his wife and child to pay off their debts by working for a friend of the brick kiln owner. Achal’s wife and small child were held by the owner as insurance in case he tried to escape or to default on the debt. Desperate to raise the money and free his wife and son, Achal attempted to sell his kidney for fast cash. When his kidney was not approved, he went to the police as a last resort. Several weeks later they organized a rescue operation and pulled out the 77 victims.

Listening to Achal’s story, I was astounded. Yet his story is hardly unique. Human Rights Watch, in a 2008 study, estimated that there are 40 million people in India living in conditions of bonded labor, conditions not too dissimilar to Achal’s. And this is only in India. In Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Costa Rica and countless other countries, young women are frequently kidnapped and forced to work in brothels as prostitutes. If they do not cooperate, they are beaten or their families are threatened. Nor are these problems confined to developing countries. Thousands of people are trafficked into the United States each year, often victims of elaborate deceptions that are designed to leave them powerless and dependent on their traffickers, alone and far from home. Human trafficking is now the third largest income generating activity in the world for organized crime syndicates, after trafficking of drugs and firearms.

The figures can be overwhelming, but there is hope. Organizations such as Restore NYC work to help women who have been trafficked into brothels in New York to heal from physical and emotional trauma, obtain work visas in the United States, receive job and skills training and generally rebuild their lives. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, recently profiled one of Restore’s clients in his column, bringing attention to the scope and severity of a problem that exists in many American cities from New York to Toledo.

Trafficking is increasingly gaining international attention as well. In 2010 a woman named Anuradha Koirala topped CNN’s list of “Heroes of the Year,” individuals the news network identifies as “everyday people changing the world.” Koirala founded an organization called Maiti Nepal in 1993 that rescues and rehabilitates women who have been trafficked from Nepal into India to work in brothels. Maiti Nepal has helped to rescue and rehabilitate more than 12,000 Nepali women and girls since its inception 18 years ago.

But even with the myriad NGOs working against human trafficking, it is an uphill battle. Their work is vital and thousands of lives have been restored, but the problem of trafficking remains. It is currently the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. The trafficking problem is so advanced that it would require institutions to exist in every country with special powers to investigate and disrupt trafficking crime syndicates. These organizations would have to employ thousands of professionals who worked around the clock to fight problems such as trafficking and organized crime. They would require state funding and a national, integrated network of offices in each and every country, state and district in the world.

Luckily, the organizations I am describing already exist in almost every country in the world: the police force. Though NGOs have been able to make headway in the trafficking problem, and to help rehabilitate victims, there is simply no substitute for qualified and well-trained criminal justice systems as a deterrent to human trafficking. The problem, as put forth by a human rights lawyer named Gary Haugen in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, is that public justice systems rarely protect those who are the most vulnerable in society. As Haugen notes, “Most public justice systems in the developing world have their roots in the colonial era, when their core function was to serve those in power—usually the colonial state. As the colonial powers departed, authoritarian governments frequently took their place. They inherited the public justice systems of the colonial past, which they proceeded to use to protect their own interests and power, in much the same way that their colonial predecessors had.” As he concludes, “without functioning public justice systems to deliver the protections of the law to the poor, the legal reforms of the modern human rights movement rarely improve the lives of those who need them most.”

But this is not cause for cynicism. In 2005, with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the NGO that Haugen founded in order to help develop public justice systems, International Justice Mission (IJM), partnered with the metropolitan police department in Cebu, Philippines on a project to develop the capacity of the Cebu police to combat forced prostitution within its city limits. The initiative, called Project Lantern, consisted of a simple strategy: to provide local police with training and resources to identify cases of forced prostitution, safely conduct operations to rescue victims, and to prosecute the perpetrators of trafficking under existing statutes in the Philippine legal code.

Beginning in 2006, Crime and Justice Analysts (CJA), a research and evaluation firm specializing in crime and criminal justice issues, began an independent study to test the effectiveness of Project Lantern. At the end of four years, CJA found a 79% decrease in the availability of minors for sex in commercial sex establishments and street-based prostitution. The study confirmed that investment in criminal justice systems can have a direct impact in the lives of victims – 225 sex trafficking victims have been rescued over the course of the project. Furthermore, a well functioning police system can act as a powerful deterrent for future criminals. Eighty-seven suspected traffickers have been arrested over the course of the project, and 2010 saw landmark convictions of two trafficking ringleaders. Criminals in Cebu are thinking twice before they kidnap and victimize young women.

All of this should add up to a message of cautious hope. Victims of modern day slavery can be rescued and trafficking itself can be curbed. We simply need the political will to invest in criminal justice systems, which, when given proper resources, have shown a remarkable ability to shut down human trafficking, rescue victims and prevent future abuse. Criminal justice systems exist in every country in the world, they are simply in need of attention. To address trafficking, we do not need to reinvent the wheel; we simply need to fix it.

Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Bonard Fowler.

I turned up my car radio as Debbie Elliot reported that former Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler had pled guilty to second degree manslaughter for fatally shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965 outside a café in Perry County, Alabama. Jackson was a young civil rights activist and his death galvanized the movement that then marched from Selma to Montgomery. I hardly need report that Fowler is white and Jackson, black.

I’m no expert on this period of our country’s history and had not been following the story, so while commentators expressed mixed feelings about the anticlimactic sentencing—Fowler was sentenced to six months in prison, in part due to his failing health at age seventy-seven—I was arrested by the personal element of the story.

As a part of the plea bargain, the judge asked Fowler to apologize to Jackson’s family, including the slain man’s daughter and sister, who were present in the courtroom. Fowler did so, but as the prosecutor told NPR, “the family would’ve liked for him to have looked at them when he said it, but he was looking at the judge when he said it.”

I thought of that family, who waited more than forty years for legal action to be taken for the killing of their loved one. Years were spent longing for acknowledgement of wrong-doing, of their pain, of the injustice of the death of this young man. I can only imagine the added sting of knowing that this white man could take away the life of a young black man without consequence, even decades after the marches, sit-ins and bus boycotts were over. How they must have wondered—perhaps just in fleeting moments– if what they had gained in the civil rights movement was worth the death of one loved most dearly, especially if his death would never see justice.

As I read more of the story later, I began to see Fowler as a person as well. Here was a man who had lived most of his life with the guilt of killing a young man he says he never meant to kill. Even if he did act with intent, he is now an old man, frail and human, haunted by the wrong he has done. Would six months in prison erase the pain of the Jackson family, much less expunge the guilt of Fowler? As Jackson’s daughter, Cordelia Bllingsley said, “this is supposed to be closure, but there will never be closure.”

Weeks before hearing the story on the radio, I sat in a lecture hall to hear Pat Nolan of Justice Fellowship speak about restorative justice, an alternative means of responding to acts of crime that has at its aim restoring criminals to society while also addressing the harm caused to the crime’s victim. Restorative justice is only effective in instances when the perpetrator is penitent. It involves the victim in the sentencing process, giving the victim the opportunity to confront the person who has wronged them; the offender likewise has the chance to offer sincere apology to the person harmed. For both parties, this process gives a face to the other. The criminal and victim both see each other as human beings and recognition gives way to empathy. Sentencing is then decided in a mediation-like setting with the aims of making the price meaningful—that it actually addresses the harm experienced by the victim—and even restorative. In many cases, the sentencing outcomes of restorative justice procedures include measures that will ultimately help the perpetrator re-enter society as a rehabilitated individual.

And so I turn again to the long awaited trial and sentencing of James Bonard Fowler. Why did this fail to answer the cry for justice? Why was there no closure? What went wrong? If we look at these people not as symbols of our nation’s moral failings, but as individuals who have caused harm and been harmed, what do we see? A daughter who grew up without a father, who now feels that her fatherlessness has not been acknowledged. A remorseful old man who can’t undo his sins. Could restorative justice have resulted in a different outcome? Perhaps Fowler would have looked the Jackson family in the eyes as he apologized.

For a moment, I fight my own tendency to think, “who cares how these people feel? The court has decided that this is justice and they just have to live with it.” And that’s true. By the standards of our legal system, justice has finally been done in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. But is anyone satisfied? The outcome has addressed which law has been violated, who is responsible and how we should punish them, but the victim has been entirely left out. In any case that ends in a guilty plea, victims like Cordelia Billingsley have no voice in the court room.

What if our justice system treated both victim and perpetrator as human beings and acknowledged that far more is broken than a statute? Suppose we considered who has been harmed and to what extent? What if we were concerned not with punishment, but with holding the responsible party accountable to make things right?

I suppose the question that matters here is how we define justice. Our current system will prevail as long as we define justice in terms of punishment for a law broken, rather than as holding a person responsible to right the harm they have done to others.

It’s not a matter of being tough or soft on crime, but of whether the consequences acknowledge the wrongs done and even in a small way, right them.  Responding to a criminal act should not require us to shed our capacity to see others as human beings. Restorative justice requires imagination, the possibility that wrongdoers could be rehabilitated– the dream that victim and perpetrator could actually reconcile. It’s a dream worth having.

Joel Bartlett, one of PATB's founding members. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

In 1959, urban observer, writer, and activist Jane Jacobs visited Boston’s North End.  There, she was amazed that a community many dismissed as too far gone had revitalized without any outside financing or urban planning.  How had the North End built itself into a safe, well-groomed, healthy neighborhood?  Through neighbors voluntarily exchanging skilled work.

But that was in the 1950s.  Can the same types of exchanges — where time, not cash, is the currency — still build communities that ought to be?

Members of Pennsylvania’s Phoenixville Area Time Bank say yes, the free exchange of time can create cohesive, trusting, and beautiful neighborhoods, and they have seen it happen.

Time banks build on the age-old concept of swapping, and provide a web-based infrastructure that lets people bank hours instead of money.  Members contribute services like plumbing, tutoring, computer repair, respite care, driving, shopping, and childcare.  Logging service hours into a database means they’ve earned hours to “spend” by having any of the 170 Phoenixville Area Time Bank members provide a service for them.

And an hour means an hour, no matter what hourly rate the work could fetch elsewhere.  “Yes,” says board member Joel Bartlett, “my hour of architectural services is worth a disabled person’s hour of weeding!”  Also, the person served reimburses all expenses so that it is purely a time-for-time exchange.

Phoenixville Area Time Banker Kris Craig. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

New members receive a list of over 70 suggested services they might contribute or need.  “Exchanges can be as creative as anyone’s imagination,” says Judy Antipin, a Phoenixville Area Time Bank member since 2007.  Judy’s partner Diane recently returned from the hospital and about six PATB members gave her meals and rides and cleaned her house.  Member Richard Liston is banking time dollars to earn help with the fledgling Sphere College, a free college he founded for nontraditional students.  One member banked enough hours to have time dollars pay for a whole wedding.

But more is happening than the exchange of services, members insist.  “The transactional piece is a piece,” says member Carol Meerschaert, who recently discovered PATB on Meetup.com.  She pictures a time bank as a small village or an extended family.  Transactions forge trust and inspire responsiveness.  It takes trust to have a stranger pick you up from the airport, but members are accountable to each other.  There is a “kind of reverence we bring to each other,” says coordinator Margo Ketchum.  As people bank their time and meet each other, they begin to care about each other.

This is essential in Phoenixville, a gentrifying borough of 16,000 about 30 miles from Philadelphia, that, like many of Pennsylvania’s former iron towns, went from whirring with industry to decaying economically in the last century.  Like a lucky few, Phoenixville has begun rehabilitating with arts and business.  It features beacons of hipness such as creperies, cafés, bistros, and independent bookstores. Thrilling as these beacons are, changes of this sort have often, across America, turned ugly, territorial, and marginalizing when neighbors do not have each other’s best interests in mind.

PATB was not formed to help Phoenixville navigate its neighborhood renewal, but it does want to support a truly resilient community.  Time banks facilitate this because, as Bartlett puts it, “Exchanges are not exchanges.  They’re connections.”  If members connect with neighbors, they begin to realize what matters to their neighbors.   Meerschaert explains that this means that people care about crime, taxes, school budgets — the things that affect these neighbors whom they now know much better.

What’s remarkable about these connections is that they intentionally enfold

Mary Webb, Margaret Carman, and PATB coordinator Margo Ketchum discuss Phoenixville Area Time Bank's "2010 Project." Photo: Charles Bartholomew

vulnerable residents, who often get sidelined or used as leverage during gentrification.  Forty non-profits exist in Phoenixville and provide a spectrum of care for area residents. When Ketchum, her husband Joel Bartlett, and a number of others heard Time Banks USA founder Edgar S. Cahn speak at one of these non-profits, an idea was born for a time bank with a unique niche.

They observed that those who benefited from social service agencies were not encouraged to give back to Phoenixville.  Passive receiving was the usual model.  Those who worked for social service agencies, on the other hand, saw themselves as givers only and had a hard time accepting help.  Many time banks dedicate themselves to a cause, and this would be PATB’s.  For people in the helping professions, says Meerschaert, who is also the marketing and communications director for Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, this was “a way to say ‘I need help’ in a safe environment.”  In 2010, PATB has begun a “2010 Project” to focus even more on serving the disenfranchised, and twenty-five percent of their members are currently convalescent, unemployed, or otherwise vulnerable.

Time Banks level the playing field.  As the PATB vision statement says, they connect unmet needs with personal talents.

A Time Bank Social at Maysie's Farm, outside Phoenixville. Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

Krishna Evans is a vivid example of this.  She had devoted so much energy and money to raising her children that she put off small repairs on her family’s home.  After joining the time bank two months ago, Evans engaged Bartlett to paint her fence and another member to fix “little annoying things around the house.”  Evans had unmet practical needs.  She also has talents that are invaluable to others.  She has a social work background, delights in spending time with seniors, and loves to garden.  So she earns hours by being a resource for the elderly, sharing a knack for gardening, and looking out for seniors’ needs.  Banking these hours leads to more possibilities.  She hopes to take piano lessons from another member.  “I never had the luxury to pay someone to teach me piano,” she says, bright-eyed.  “I’m expanding who I am.”

Time banks are expanding people’s options and Phoenixville’s possibilities.  But what about neighborhoods that do not yet have a time bank of their own?  PATB is currently following two small new time banks in the area and offering the umbrella of their infrastructure.  There are about 50 time banks nationwide and many in the United Kingdom, but for those who are not near one of these, the closest time bank may provide ways to link up with a few people nearby and establish an informal program.

From the Phoenixville group that urges those typically seen as “needy” to contribute, to the Brooklyn HMO that uses time dollars to cut seniors’ hospital bills, to the Oakland, California church that, according to Bartlett, used time dollars to set up a community watch system, time banks solve baffling problems.  Where neighborhood swaps may have happened spontaneously in the past, our culture of structured social networking calls for more coordinated forms of swapping.  And this structure is meeting not just  material needs, but also fundamental, intangible ones.

Courtesy of the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ever since the institution began, and certainly since the 1970s, the American death penalty has been an object of insatiable scrutiny in the criminal justice system of the West. Europe is appalled that we still have it. The Middle East is appalled that we don’t use it more frequently. In some states it’s non-existent, others it’s little more than a myth, and there are still some that can’t seem to get enough of it. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Texas.) So the debate will go on until the unlikely day when the federal government abolishes executions altogether.

Yet even while the fires of the capital punishment debate show no signs of cooling, a recent Supreme Court ruling has started afresh a new debate, rooted in the same constitutional criticism as execution-abolition. With executions on the decline while recidivism has been inching its way up the charts over nearly three decades, those lovable lefties have taken up the faithful arms of that pesky Eighth Amendment once more in order to propel the next Great Debate: life imprisonment for minors.

The Eighth Amendment states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines be imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” That’s it. Seventeen simple, highly interpretable words, upon which universalists, liberals, and abolitionists have stood tall and proud on ethical, moral and political soapboxes to proclaim all that is wrong with the punitive branch of our justice system, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. For some, execution of any sort is seen as cruel and unusual, though it is, ironically, one of the most consistent forms of punishment throughout history, which surely excludes it from being unusual. Then there are the conditionalists who insist that only some forms of execution are cruel and unusual, as though we might be able to convince the condemned — or even ourselves — that we really do care for their well-being if we poison them instead of bludgeoning them to death; firing squads are mean, but hanging is okay; gas chambers leave a bad political aftertaste, but electrocution gets a majority thumbs-up. Still yet there are the legalists who rightly point out that the certainty of someone’s guilt is rarely substantial enough to take his or her life — perhaps the most tolerable and certainly the most logical of the arguments. And then at the farthest liberal end, the place where idealism trumps truth, there are those whose only wobbly leg to stand on is the one that says everyone deserves a second chance. But while an unstable footing may be enough to prop up the Eighth Amendment against death, it only touts social idealism and naivety when positioned against the argument of life in prison.

The case highlighted here is that of Graham v. Florida in which Terrence Graham, a minor at the time, was given a plea deal to avoid a guilty judgment in an alleged armed robbery. One of the terms of that deal was a probationary period, which he allegedly violated, sending him back to court for adjudication for the original robbery. At that time he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

The argument, which the Supreme Court upheld, was rooted in the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and cites a series of other cases in both recent and not-so-recent history which have set precedent to define what is “cruel and unusual”. Without getting into the nitty gritty, the Court’s majority opinion is summed up by Justice Kennedy, who argues that a minor should have an opportunity to change. He writes, “Life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope.” This, he says, makes the punishment both cruel and unusual.

But Justice Kennedy is operating on an idealist principle which says that the prison system is designed for reform rather than the truth, which is that prison has much more to do with punishment. For years the criminal justice system has been trumpeting to the media about incarceration’s rehabilitative qualities– how it shouldn’t be seen as an entirely punitive measure, that there is much more to it than locking them up and throwing away the key. Sadly, Justice Kennedy, a would-be conservative who can’t seem to stop drinking the liberal draught, has enthusiastically pledged to sing along.

The truth is, though, that no matter how many educational programs, social workers, religious institutions, or other rehabilitative measures are put into place within prison walls, the system itself will continue to keep itself in business as long as it continues to put the problem children together on the playground without supervision. Indeed, such a metaphor breeds a sense of irony because it is exactly in the school system where we see a similar sociological phenomenon. Take children even from well-to-do families and put them in the best educational institutions around, but the ones who have a penchant for trouble will not only find it, but they will find each other, and from these associations they will often go on to break more rules than they would have had they never met.

Prison is exponentially worse because it only houses the troublesome ones; strictly speaking, there are no “good” social influences. There is frequently street or even gang mentality in prison: demand respect by instilling fear even if it means resorting to violence; the weak will cling to the strong in order to protect themselves, and any opposition perpetually risks life and limb.

Even outside of violence, in the regular day-to-day of prison life, social interactions will, if innocently in the beginning, veer down the wrong path. Inmates will surely make small talk as humans are wont to do, except unlike the world outside prison walls, no one is going to start a conversation with, “So, what do you do for work?” Clearly, nothing anymore. The more natural icebreaker becomes the Hollywood favorite, “So, what are you in for?”

I bring up the obvious to point out the subtle: inmates frequently talk about crime. For a few, it’s all they know. And given the choice between slowly muddling through high school equivalent education or anger management courses, teaching inmates theories with little hope of opportunity for application, or learning from one another about how to get further, faster, the majority tend to sway towards the latter, thus perpetuating the very criminal mentality the system claims to be reforming. So when the “second chance” comes around, ex-offenders become re-offenders, recidivism rates hover at a staggering two-thirds for re-arrest and fifty percent for re-incarceration (so much for rehabilitation), and criminals find themselves right back in the over-crowded system that has already failed them once.

Herein lies the true violation of the Eighth Amendment. To merely prohibit life imprisonment for a minor only looks good politically. But practically, when that minor is released from prison in twenty or even ten years, he’s still going to have a long, uncertain — and yes, frightening — road ahead of him. He has learned only how to function in a unique population subset with no real understanding of how the world outside is working. (Think how much society changes in ten years, let alone twenty or more.) To send him back out into that now-unknown world with fifty dollars, no identification, and a list of homeless shelters to be turned away from is far crueler (though I’m afraid not very unusual) than to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Even in the cases of ex-offenders being released to family and friends, to do so without further guidance than a weekly tousling with parole officers (who, often times, are ill-equipped themselves to deal with the trials of the parolee’s societal reintegration) is to set them up for failure. Well-intentioned as family and friends often are, they are just as often unable to shoulder the burden reintegration presents, and perhaps more often become part of the problem.

In fairness, it isn’t the High Court’s job to create new laws, only to uphold or strike down the rulings of lower courts. But as long as legal precedent will be the result of the Court’s decision, it would behoove the system to take further action. If Justice Kennedy and his liberal cronies want to make a real difference in the justice system, they should have a few conversations with their buddies in legislation about how we can provide the rehabilitative services offered in prison post-incarceration, rather than piously denouncing one punishment as unconstitutional while the alternative is hardly better and possibly worse. With the billions of dollars the federal government pumps into policies governing education for those who already have it, money for those who should share more of it, and wars that should be dwindling down instead of revving up, surely there can be some reallocation towards reintegration, among other things. Then, and only then, will we be able to adhere to the principles and intentions of the Eighth Amendment while simultaneously moving one step closer to providing some of those in need with a second chance that may actually have the sustenance to bear the fruit the system presently pretends to grow.

After a busy run on the film festival circuit, a theatrical release, and the upcoming DVD release of their film William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe on April 27th, I’m grateful that Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler were able to take the time for this interview.

The sisters (producers/directors) run Off Center Media, a production company that produces documentaries exposing injustice in the criminal justice system. This award-winning film about their father is scheduled to kick off this season of PBS’s POV on June 22 at 10PM. The Kunstlers received the L’Oreal Women of Worth Vision Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

What were your goals for this film? How can film carry on the legacy of social change that was crucial to your father’s life? What are some examples?

Sarah Kunstler: We believe that creativity and art have tremendous power to spur people to action. That is why we got into filmmaking. Our first film, Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War, opened our eyes to the power of art to further social change. We went to Tulia, a small town in the Texas panhandle in 1999, after a drug sting netted almost 20% of the black population, leaving more than 50 children without one or both parents. All of the charges were based on the word of a crooked undercover cop. It was horrific. We knew immediately that we needed a way to convey the injustice of the arrests and the power of the families of the incarcerated who were fighting for their loved ones. Our film brought national attention to the injustice, helped the incarcerated get new lawyers, and led ultimately to the exoneration of those arrested.

Making that film led us to form our production company, Off Center Media. Over the past ten years, we have made a number of short films highlighting injustice in the criminal justice system – from clemency videos for death row inmates, to documentaries that have been used as part of campaigns highlighting wrongful convictions or Supreme Court cases.

Emily Kunstler: Both of our parents raised us with a deep commitment to social and racial justice, and we knew from a young age that this commitment would dictate the course of our lives. There are may ways to combat social and racial justice in society; we ended up using film as our tool. Our father principally was a storyteller. He would tell a story to the jury and he would tell the same story to the general public through his skilled use of the media. Dad would have been the first to admit that all of his major court victories were decided first in the court of public opinion and then inside the walls of a courtroom. Judges and juries are often disinclined to go out on a limb and take a risk. In this way, educating the public about particular cases of injustice was just as important to our father as what when on in a courtroom. Dad would use a press conference, we use documentary film – but essentially our tactics are the same.

As filmmakers and daughters, when did you decide you were ready to tackle such a personal story on film?

EK: We had been making films for about seven years by the time the idea occurred to us. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner. I think you have to be well into your adult life before you can entertain the idea of looking backwards. Sarah and I were both approaching 30 when we began making this film. When you are young, you really want to strike out on your own. We wanted to do our own thing and not necessary be associated with our parents. I don’t think this something unique to Sarah and my experience. I think most young people feel the same way, though it may have been exacerbated by our father’s celebrity. We didn’t want to be known as our father’s daughters; we wanted to make our own mark. So in choosing to make this film, we had to not only actively embrace our past but consciously choose to identify ourselves with our father, and I don’t think that is a choice either of us would have been prepared to make sooner. But in short, we decided to make the film over a margarita lunch at a small Mexican restaurant in the Fort Greene, the Brooklyn neighborhood that is home to our production office, and we never looked back.

In light of it being such a personal film, what was the greatest challenge in making Disturbing The Universe?

SK: The greatest challenge was making the choice to tell the film from our perspectives. Our father always seemed larger than life, and during his lifetime he was the center of our world, so it was hard to find room for ourselves in the telling of his story – to figure out where we fit. But it was important to us that the film be from our perspective. Emily and I could never have made an emotionally removed straightforward bio-pic, but I think more importantly we hoped that our perspective might be a window for our generation and younger viewers into the stories of some of the most important social movements of the 20th century. Many people our age have never heard of the rebellion and massacre at Attica or the murder of Fred Hampton. It was important for us to have outside perspectives. We worked with terrific producers who helped us get enough distance to find room for our voices.

There were so many interesting characters in your father’s life. Who among them surprised you most?

EK: I think we were most surprised to find and interview Jean Fritz. Jean was one of the jurors during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and when we interviewed her almost forty years later, she still maintained a collection of all of the newspaper reports as well as her daily accounts of what transpired in the courtroom from a journal she kept at the time. What surprised us most about Jean was the transformation she went through during the seven-month trial. When the trial commenced, she considered herself to be a conservative Republican. She lived in the very conservative suburb of Des Plaines and ran an auto supply store with her husband. By the close of the trial, after seeing Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom and the clear bias of the judge toward the defense, she had come full circle. She no longer trusted or had faith in her government.

Jean’s transformation goes to the heart of our father’s belief in the jury system. He thought that if you could reach twelve random people, connect to them, take them out of their comfort zone, and show them the truth, that they wouldn’t be able to ignore it and and their thinking would be altered. Dad believed that we are all capable of transformations, large and small.

One of the things that stands out in the film is your deep respect and admiration for your father, even as you doubted many of his choices. Considering the demands of his work and his many obligations, what do you think your father did as a father, not just an attorney, that inspired such devotion from his daughters?

SK: I think he valued our opinions. Even when we were small children, he made a point of talking to us about what mattered to him – racism, the importance of standing up to and combating injustice. He involved us in what he was doing. He made us want to be a part of it. Dad loved it when we showed any interest in his work and would encourage us to challenge him. Whenever possible, he took us with him – to court, to protests, to places like Wounded Knee that were important to him. And he loved us without measure. Emily and I definitely felt that growing up.

But I also think that choosing to be the kind of lawyer, to live the kind of life that our father did requires compromises. You can’t be the kind of Dad who is there all the time. You can’t make your children your first priority. And I think our mother deserves recognition and praise in this regard, because Emily and I never would have made it without her. We had great childhoods. We were protected, we were nurtured, we thrived. And we have her to thank for that.

At the conclusion of the film, you seem to recognize the value of your father’s choices in a new way. I wonder, who do you see taking up that torch? Who do people in distress around the country ask for representation since William Kunstler is no longer here?

SK: This is a hard question – and one that is often asked of us at Q&As following our film. I don’t think there will ever be another William Kunstler. But I don’t think there should be, either. He was a person of his generation – he belonged to the time he lived in. There are a lot of dedicated lawyers out there doing good work, most of them doing it anonymously.

EK: I think, ultimately, that the world we hope to see is a world where you don’t need a Bill Kunstler to stand next to you in order to get attention for the cause you are fighting for or the injustice you are fighting against, a world where lawyers stand in solidarity with movements and where the activists do the talking.

——-

The DVD of Disturbing the Universe released on April 27, 2010 and are available through Amazon and directly from the filmmakers. The DVD can also be rented from Netflix and streamed from iTunes. The film also opens this season of PBS’s POV on June 22 at 10PM.

We are motoring away from Kwadjokrom in a red dugout boat and I have stopped crying. In the heat of the sun I smell like the road, the fine dust gritty between my teeth as I clench and unclench my jaw, trying to work out my shame at my outburst on the road from Kijiji.

Kijiji is a market just beyond the Western bank of Ghana’s Lake Volta, on whose waters thousands of slave children labor. At three or four years old, just weaned from their mothers’ breasts, they come to a lonely life of work and hunger. The fishermen who buy them are often child slaves themselves, grown up on the lake, set free at seventeen or eighteen years old to fend for themselves. At Kijiji, the masters’ wives sell the fish from the children’s nets, and this afternoon we walked in the sun among those market baskets, their mouths full to overflowing.

I am in Ghana on behalf of a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that partners with Ghanaian anti-trafficking leaders to rescue these children. One of my Ghanaian colleagues is sitting at the helm of the red dugout boat, calling to the boatman who guides our craft through the clutter of Kwadjokrom’s shore-docked fishing boats. The boats are shaped like thin moons, each end tipped up, and their wooden flanks are painted with David and Goliath, the Good Shepherd, and the Rainbow and the Dove. We are on our way from Kijiji to a fishing island, where a fisherman has promised to give up a little boy he keeps.

Yet as we push out, my thoughts are of Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, black map dots that rise in my mind with the rhythm of a dull heartbeat. I have no reason to think of those cities while I am here in Ghana, except that they mark for me the trafficking route of a friend, and I have seen Kijiji.

It does not make sense. It did not make sense half an hour ago on the road from Kijiji, when the old man sitting behind me in our rickety trotro asked, through an acquaintance’s translation, why was I so angry?

I did not realize that I was shrieking in the trotro’s cramped cab, holding forth in a language that only three of my traveling companions could fully comprehend.

“Using Craigslist is like buying a coach class ticket on the upper deck of a slave ship,” I think I yelled. The old man was perplexed. “They sell thousands of kids in sex trafficking and prostitution and they could care less!” He did not get that either. “Everyone who buys a used couch knows what’s happening in the ‘adult services’ section and doesn’t care!”

At this point, one of my English-speaking companions yelled back, in near-equal force, that I should zip it. He was right. I turned in my seat to face the front of the bus and the rutted, dusty road leading up to the lake. I was crying now, less from the reprimand and more from the map of the cities I had remembered. I brought my handkerchief up to wipe my forehead and nose and then I held it to my mouth.

It was nearly five years ago that I met the woman whose life is in that map of Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. I was newly married and newly arrived in the third of four cities my husband and I would call home that year. I was teaching literature at a university, but I wanted to keep a hand in the anti-trafficking community, so I signed on for the first meet-up of Polaris Project’s Seattle chapter. When I arrived at the meet-up, she was there, too.

I know what it means to be lonely. I know the delicate aspect it brings to a person’s face and the white cast it brings to the eyes and skin. I know less well how to bear up under my own loneliness, whenever and why-ever it arrives. When I see the kind of fortitude that I lack alive in someone else, I mark it. I know I will need that memory.

When she was fourteen, her father left. Her mother followed. Improbably, she was left alone in blue-collar suburban Seattle, where she was found by an older boyfriend-cum-savior-cum-pimp. She was beaten, raped, and sold on the streets and on the Internet. She was cut, branded, and thrown out of moving cars. The West Coast circuit – Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles – was her pimp’s bread-and-butter. When she became pregnant by him with a second child, she took her two-year-old daughter and fled.

It is hard to befriend a woman who grew up in the rigged world of a “stable” – a slang term for the women that a pimp owns, exploits, and uses to exploit each other. A woman who has known this life wants to love and to be loved, but she does not believe that love can be given freely.

When my husband and I moved to Washington, D.C., my friend and I kept in touch for a while. Once when I called her apartment, I got a drunken woman who told me that my friend and her daughters had been kicked out. I begged for another number and the woman gave me the line for a motel room, where my friend answered once and a man, whose voice I did not trust, answered a second and final time.

These days, Facebook cuts short the romanticism of myriad lost loves and lost friendships, sometimes for the better. I looked for my friend on Facebook last year, sometime in the wake of the Boston Craigslist murders, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Polaris Project, and several U.S. Attorney Generals rallied – and ultimately lost their battle – to stop human trafficking via the Craigslist erotic services (now “adult services”) section.

In the midst of the brouhaha, I found my friend. Her Facebook profile was meager and her wall was a strange slate of auto-generated messages, but this seemed in some way fitting for all the abuse she had experienced in the world of mid-nineties Internet.

Knowing what she had overcome, I understood what my friends and colleagues were after in their campaign to clean up Craigslist. I was not sure that attempting to reform an online kingpin, especially one who had no natural impetus to do so, was the best way to do it.

I stumbled on to Kijiji – www.kijiji.com of eBay, rather than Kijiji of the Kwadjokrom overbank, the red dust road, and the market where women sell fish caught by slave children – sometime during those months. I talked to a few colleagues about what it might look like to stage a kijiji.com “other-cott” and steer like-minded friends toward an online classifieds site that chooses, of its own accord, to entirely prohibit the “adult services” ads that make Craigslist a haven for human traffickers.

But the other-cott did not go anywhere. Or, to rephrase, I did not take it anywhere. I do not know why.

What I do know is that today on the road from Kijiji, someone mentioned Craigslist. I was thinking of my friend, I remembered how many thousands of boys, girls, women, and men like her had been sex trafficked on Craigslist, and without counting the cost, I began shrieking incoherently and obnoxiously about slave ships and sins of omission.

I would like to laugh about the incident, but it occurred while I was on the clock – and besides the inquisitive old man, our trotro ferried half of our Ghanaian partner staff, a former White House economic development expert, and one of Touch A Life Foundation’s most faithful and generous supporters.

It was a bad moment.

I have apologized sincerely to the person at whom I shrieked the loudest. I will apologize tomorrow morning to the other shriek-ee, who was in fearfully close-range. If I can find the old man, I promise that I will apologize to him, too.

I figure that since I have nothing left to lose, I might as well go all out.

I want you – my colleagues, friends, family, random people I went to high school with – to know that Craigslist’s convenience is not worth its price.

If you want to stop human trafficking, stop using Craigslist and use kijiji.com. Tell your friends to do it, too. The more, the merrier, and the better the second-hand shopping selection.

And if you think of it, please pray for my friend and pray for me, that in every way that our lives intersect, I would love her well.

For more information, check out:

Kijiji: www.kijiji.com

Kijiji Rules of Use

Polaris Project’s Letter to Craigslist CEO

Polaris Project’s Quick stats & Client Service Reflections re: Craigslist

Craiglist complies with some of its critics’ requests, but human trafficking persists.

Get involved:

Join the Facebook group.

Sign the Change.org Petition

This article originally appeared in a slightly different form at the author’s blog, and is reprinted by permission.