Not For Sale

"I am not for sale. You are not for sale. No one should be for sale."

The Not For Sale Campaign [www.notforsalecampaign.org] is a group of people, any and all people, fighting human trafficking and the global slave trade.

On the website, you can find ways of helping to fight the slave trade, information on how the human trafficking industry is flourishing, updates on what people are already doing, descriptions of the lives of those in bondage, and a store that sells jewelry and t-shirts made by the abolitionist groups and books written by no-longer-enslaved people.

I read some of the blog entries about people, especially children, who had been abducted, sold, or tricked into slavery, and it absolutely tore my heart to pieces. I have a very, very soft spot in my heart for mistreated and hurting children, so discovering so much suffering on such a level was a real heart-wrenching thing for me.

Something that really got me was that this isn't just happening in far-away places like Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand, but even in countries like New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. In fact, Craigslist.com, which is popularly used to find garage sales, is in fact becoming a larger and larger part of the slave trade industry, yet they seem to be doing little to nothing about it.

So now my feelings for this have grown beyond sorrow and longing to help children and women in distant lands to a fear of this becoming a threat to me in my own home.

Please visit NotForSaleCampaign.org and learn more about this tragedy. If you can, do something. Spread the word, make a donation, go on a trip, read a book. Do anything you can, even if it's very small, because something has to be done. "If something has to be done, do something. Even if you don't know what to do, don't just do nothing." Nothing is beneficial enough to justify an industry of human suffering. I hope that this campaign can grow until it really does wipe out the global slave trade.

<3 o.