Taking Care of People

I woke up this morning feeling slightly more than defeated. Last night, I fell deeply into my current book (The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer) which, combined with my impromptu post-birthday-celebration daytime nap, kept me up much later than usual. In a misguided attempt to get at least seven hours of sleep, I pushed my alarm from 7:00 to 8:00 and woke up sorely missing that lost hour as I scrambled to adjust to additional Writing Center hours tacked on to the beginning of the first full week of teaching since Spring break started to cycle through my various schools. When I opened my email to find that a batch of student emails intended to go out last Friday had misfired, I knew I was in for it.

Five hours in, I hauled my slightly brain dead self out of the basement adjunct office at Rock Valley College and made the trek to the Student Center for a sandwich. Given the state of the day--I was making progress but wasn't yet able to believe there would be a light at the end of the tunnel--I wasn't expected to be pleasantly surprised. I just wanted to get in a quick early lunch before I started the six-hour marathon of tutoring, copying, teaching, teaching.

On my way back to the office, I noticed a student representative of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship standing next to some signs announcing "Justice Week" and "Stopping Slavery." Having recently read through half of Kristof and WuDunn's Half the Sky I knew this man must be representing the issue of human trafficking and the sex trade. I stopped at the table and volunteered my services.

For those of you who don't know, human trafficking and the sex trade along with a third-world distaste for and distrust of women are major issues whose statistics (and real-life, human stories) are not only tragic and heartbreaking but also deeply, deeply disturbing. Here are some snippets from the June 2010 Vintage Books edition of Half the Sky:

"The total number of modern slaves is difficult to estimate. The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that '1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million'" (9).

"...in the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under eighty thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. The average then dropped to a bit more than fifty thousand between 1811 and 1850. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries..." (11).

"Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined" (61).

The book is riddled with staggering numbers that make a person wonder why this isn't mainstream news everywhere, every day. It also forces you to stare first-world and male privileges in the eye. Before anyone accuses me of transmitting "liberal guilt"--whatever that is--let me say that these stories shouldn't make you feel guilt, they should make you angry. They should prime you for action.

The only trouble is figuring out how to help. I had to stop reading the book half way through because I was too depressed and felt incapacitated. What was I supposed to do to help these people? There are brilliant stories in the book about people--even first-world people--dropping everything and volunteering at hospitals and safe houses for abused women. It's fantastic but it isn't practical for me. And when you walk around dealing with legitimate everyday troubles in a first-world country (I didn't get enough sleep, my car needs an oil change, my internet is slower than normal today, my student loan debts are too high, etc.) it's hard to simultaneously add on the human rights struggles of women in a world where humans not only refuse to take care of each other but insist on harming each other for profit. Even on a good day it can seem equally difficult to ignore the problem and face the problem head on.

That's why I was delighted to see Intervarsity spearheading a Rock Valley College coalition of student groups with the goal of raising $600 to support the counseling and education of a young girl recently rescued from the sex slave trade. I grabbed the Justice Week Classroom Announcement sheet, a plastic cup (see photo above) and my copy of Half the Sky. I read the announcement in both of my classes today and am officially collecting spare change from my students and anyone I catch in the adjunct office. In ten minutes I collected $4.81 and expect to get more on Wednesday when students are planning on bringing change to class. And I'm just one person. The drive goes on all week so if you are interested in donating from wherever you are, you can mail me a check made out to Marc Malone to the following address:

Marc Malone
Adjunct Instructor of English
Rock Valley College
3301 North Mulford Road
Rockford, IL 61114

Today I am grateful that, when people come together to take care of people, it's possible to make a dent in someone's life in a place far, far away. It reminds you that, despite its horrors and inequities, humanity can be a beautiful thing.