Trafficked

“There are 30 million slaves. God, we believe that you are going to allow us to rescue these people.”

These words hit me as I sat comfortably in a cushy balcony seat in my college gymnasium while listening to Bianca Olthoff, a pastor at Mariner’s Church in Irvine, CA, Chief Storyteller for the A21 Campaign, and speaker for a 2015 Missions Conference session during my freshman year of college. Although I was physically comfortable, my heart was not. My heart began to feel burdened to see change. These were the words that began a passion in me to see people freed from modern day human slavery.

Bianca continued on to recount a story of her and her office getting a word from God that they needed to pray for the “Stan” Countries. . . Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. . .

“We began to pray. We began to charge heaven’s gate believing that the freedom that is spoken about in Galations 5:1: ‘For it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,’ and if that is the truth then it is our duty and obligation to free those that are around the world.”

She went on to say that two days later, a group of women from Uzbekistan were rescued from their captors. They said they had been enslaved for two years, and for those two years, had been praying to Allah to save them. They then said that two days before they were rescued, they decided to pray to the Jesus of Europe, and they were rescued.

She went on to mention that Bulgaria, along with Greece, is one of the main hubs of human trafficking in Europe.

My ears perked up.

Bulgaria. My Bulgaria?

To give some background, I’m half Bulgarian. My dad is native Bulgarian, still lives in Bulgaria, and I grew up visiting the beautiful Balkan country. But I had never known this about it.

From then on, I started to do a bit of research on human trafficking specifically in Bulgaria.

Apparently is not only a big for human trafficking in Europe, but the biggest hub of human trafficking in Europe.

Men, women, and children are taken from Bulgaria to destinations such as Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Norway, Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, and even the U.S. generally to be sold for sex or forced labor.

The problem of human trafficking started on the rise after 1989, when Communism collapsed, along with the economy of the already unstable country. In 2012, it was named the poorest country in the EU by Eurostat. One fifth of its citizens live below in the poverty line, making it conducive to organized crime and exploitation of its citizens in the form of human trafficking.

My heart is heavy as I write these statistics to you, but I am also encouraged by the testimonies such as those that Bianca retold with so much conviction.

I know this is not the typical, lighthearted blog, but I write to you, hoping that the conviction to get involved in the conversation would spark in you.

If you liked to get more educated on the subject of human trafficking, or would like to read up more on how to get involved, you can follow this link to the A21 site.

If you’d like to check out Bianca Olthoff’s lecture that I quoted at the beginning of this blog post, you can do so here!