R.A. Dickey’s Story

Great story about R.A. Dickey, major league pitcher fighting sex trafficking:

This is Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai, among the most notorious sex-trafficking locations in the world. I am here as a guest of Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a charity that has been fighting human trafficking for more than 20 years, one I joined forces with last year, when two friends and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $130,000 , much of it from generous and kind-hearted Mets fans. I have come with my two daughters, Gabriel, 11, and Lila, 9, to witness the fruits of our climb – the conversion of a former brothel to a health clinic. I want my daughters to share the experience not so much as a gratitude check, but to learn that each of us has a capacity to make a difference in this world, and to see that God’s grace makes that possible….

I first learned about BTC from a friend at our church in Nashville. I quickly felt called to be a part of it, and not long after Gabriel, Lila and I completed our 20-hour journey – from Nashville to New York to Doha to India – I understood why. The breadth of the wickedness is almost too much to bear. Recruiters go to the poorest and most remote towns and villages, often hanging around train stations, enticing girls and young women with the promise of a job in the city as a seamstress or a house cleaner. Except that there aren’t any seams or houses; there are only the brothels and the cages and the 4-foot by 7-foot rooms where they are kept for years, until they die of HIV, or are just discarded as if they were trash. After a while, a year or two – however long it takes for them to be broken – the women are let out of the cages. They are so hopeless and beaten down they no longer need bars or wires; they are incarcerated by their shattered souls. They are people who are not even on the map, not even a number in a government file. They can’t speak up for themselves; BTC does it for them.