Help Fight Human Trafficking in Nepal!

Partly thanks to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the Liam Neeson flick Taken and the insightful columns of Nicholas Kristof, Western audiences are finally waking up to the harsh realities of human trafficking and the modern day slave trade. In the United States of America where (at least in the Union states) our sense of political values and social justice are largely inherited from ante bellum Abolitionism, many citizens whose consciousnesses have been expanded to this present evil are eager to learn what they can do to help. Unfortunately, the worst of the worst of this problem is confined to the domestic slave markets of Africa and Asia and thus it is daunting for stateside abolitionists to get involved. However, two of my activist friends are organizing to do some real promising work to fight human trafficking in Nepal – and they would appreciate your help.


The first of these modern day abolitionists is my old pal Dan Linden from Katonah, New York. Dan is perhaps the most unlikely of activists – he is a classical Spanish guitarist by training, a music instructor by trade, and he has spent the past few years teaching Nepalese schoolchildren about scales and chords. Nevertheless, the blatantly visible commerce in sex slaves in his adopted Nepal has so horrified Mr. Linden that he has been roused into action as a matter of conscience. In his own words:

Nepalese girls, as young as six and at a rate of about fifteen a day, are drugged and taken to India by people they know and trust, or are lured my false promises of job opportunities there. It is estimated that there are 200,000 sex slaves in the Kamathipura district of Mumbai alone, living in horrific conditions in what are known as “the cages.” Upon arrival, those who refuse will be raped, brutally beaten or burned with cigarettes or even threatened to be buried alive until they break. They will then begin a routine of forced sex with as many as forty customers a day. The younger girls may be forced to live most of their childhoods under a bed until they are old enough to be desirable to customers.

While in Nepal I was pleased to observe firsthand as a woman from Maiti Nepal boarded the bus I was on and questioned passengers, deciphering whether one of the girls on board might be a victim. Maiti Nepal is an organization founded by Anuradha Koirala which works on many fronts to fight sex trafficking including raising awareness in the villages most at risk of losing their daughters, intercepting traffickers and those being trafficked on bus routes, and providing health care, a home and career opportunities for those who have been rescued.

In an effort to support Maiti Nepal’s courageous efforts, Dan is hosting a fundraiser on June 14 at 6 PM at the Katonah Village Library in Katonah, NY. There will be a viewing of the film The Day My God Died followed by a discussion with the Massachusetts non-profit organization Friends of Maiti Nepal, who work in partnership with Ms. Koirala. For more information, or if you would like to make a donation online, please visit Maiti Nepal or Friends of Maiti Nepal.

Other abolitionists are working to combat human trafficking via more non-traditional methods. My lovely cousin Anya Cherneff has spent the past five years studying for her Masters at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and campaigning against human trafficking. Understanding that slavery is fundamentally the symptom of underdeveloped economies and sheer desperation, Anya decided to try a new demand-side angle to the problem; If so many women and men find themselves in bad “jobs” because they are forced to take risky offers to survive, why not create an alternative for them—a space for choice?

Anya’s fiancée Bennett Cohen has been implementing fossil fuel use reduction strategies and studying natural resource management for the past five years. After years of working to affect change in the developed world he had an idea: why not get it right the first time with community-scale renewable energy projects in the developing world?

So Anya and Bennett decided to join forces and combine their passions to promote gender equality and clean energy in marginalized communities. They set off for Asia in search of inspiration and understanding. They met with organizations in Nepal, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand running community development projects, setting up social enterprises, micro-financing, fighting against sex trafficking, and bringing renewable power to marginalized communities. Everywhere they went people were interested in using renewable power in their communities and creating more jobs at home to reduce the need for migration and improve women’s social position. And so they are launching Empower Generation —an initiative to advance community sustainability and gender equality through the promotion of renewable energy technology, micro-enterprise and natural resource management.

For their first project, Anya and Bennett are trying to help out a Nepalese woman named Sita Adhikari who wants to set up a biogas system construction and maintenance company . The biogas systems will use locally available organic wastes – i.e. human and livestock fecal matter – to produce methane gas for energy supply. Empower Generation's current fundraiser provides the start-up capital for Sita's biogas business. To learn more, check out their blog and help contribute to the loan that Sita needs to start her biogas business! produce methane gas for energy supply.

I've already received some criticism for this post along the lines of "Hey Zac, I thought you had drank the Ayn Rand bug juice and you're totally against foreign aid. But now you're making a pitch for us to make donations?" I'm very sorry if my scribblings of criticism of foreign aid have given anyone that impression.

I'm not a critic of all aid projects - I'm just a critic of bad aid projects which don't work, because they discredit and denigrate those aid projects which do have greater potential for actually making a difference. I think that the philanthropically-minded amongst us should certainly act according to our hearts and donate our time, resources, and yes, sometimes even some of our expendable income to such projects. But before you cut a check to anyone, it's absolutely necessary to do a thorough job of researching the cause and the means by which Charity X, Y or Z aims to remedy the problem.

I think that Dan, Anya and Bennett's activism is worthwhile not just because they are my friends, relatives and soon-to-be relatives. Believe me, I have turned down many, many prior requests from good friends to utilize this blog as a soapbox because it takes a lot to win the Zac Mason Seal of Approval. Maiti Nepal is an established human rights organization that is working on the ground in that country to fight human trafficking, and from what I've read, I only have reason to believe that they are spending their donations in relatively cost-effective, sound avenues. And though Empower Generation has yet to become a household name, that is because this initiative is brand new and just about to take off. I think that Anya and Bennett are brilliant young activists with the human rights know-how and the technical prowess to establish an organization that provides actual market-based solutions to the fundamentally economic problem of human trafficking. Like with any fledgling enterprise, there is of course an element of risk to investing in something new - but I trust these individuals so much that I must conclude that investing in Empower Generation is a risk worth taking.

Human Sanitation with Feline Inspiration

So I woke up one morning and let my kitten out to pee and set up my solar panel to bask in the rising Sun. Usually I start my days walking down the street greeting everyone in my village and try to get them excited about treating their wells and drinking water. But today I just felt like venting to my kitten.

“James Brown, what’s the point of it all? The people of Sanadougou tell the Peace Corps that they want me to help them with water sanitation, I spend all day teaching people about water-borne disease prevention and they don’t do a damn thing I tell them! Every day I tell people they should drink pump water instead of well water and how they should filter their drinking water with cloth and treat it with bleach and yet they continue to drink worm-infested well water because they say that it tastes better than pump water!!! And I know that they’re not doing anything differently because at night I can smell all the gaseous sulfur from the aggregate diarrhea of everyone in this village! Why do I do this?!?! Why am I here?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?!

James Brown replied, “Get a grip on yo self Madu! You gotta understand! The Bambara people have been living like this for thousands of years! Almost nuthin changes! You been here six months, and you frustrated cuz you ain’t changed nuthin yet? Take a chill pill!!! You gotta learn patience!!!

“You got a point there James. But I don’t understand how people who tell me every day how sick they are and how poor they are can be so resistant to change. It’s just absurd.”

“Put yourself in their position! You’re a Bambara peanut farmer, dig? And some white dude from the suburbs waltzes into your village and tells you you’re doing everything wrong! This honky tells you that diseases come from tiny animals that you’ve never seen! Then he starts tellin’ you that wizards ain’t real! You’d think that punk be talkin' Jive! You'd say ‘screw you, honky!’ You wouldn’t do a damn thing different!”

“But what am I supposed to do? Stop trying to teach people about giardia and amoebas?”

Al – my solar panel – chimed in. “No, Zachary, I would advise that you continue on your current course of action despite its lack of easily measurable achievement. For example, the other day Moustapha told you that he treated his well with liquid bleach like you told him to. I would consider that a success unto itself.”

“C’mon, Al, Moustapha is just one person! There are like 4,427 other people in this village! At this rate they’ll all be treating their drinking water in the year 6224!”

“I would not be so pessimistic, Zachary. When I presided over the first Senate hearings on global warming in 1988 I was received with such skepticism that I was practically laughed out of the committee chamber, for at the time this phenomenon was understood almost exclusively within the academic community. In my 1993 environmental treatise Earth in the Balance I explained the climatological science in relative layman’s terms, and my message reached a substantially larger audience. But it was not until 2006 when I produced and narrated the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that public opinion was so roused in favor of a national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and only now in the year 2009 does it look like public opinion has shifted to such a degree that the cap-and-trade program which I have advocated has a chance of passing both houses of Congress.”

“Al, you lost me. What does global warming have to do with diarrhea?”

“Actually, the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, for methane actually constitutes one of the most significant biogenic greenhouse gases – and the amount of methane released by the human digestive system actually spikes due to cases of giardiasis and amoebic dysentery. If we could provide potable water supplies to the population of roughly 2 billion persons currently lacking, then that could make a consequential reduction in the annual tonnage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, the point of my analogy between my campaign for sensible climate policy and your campaign for improved water sanitation practices is that you should look into trying new forms of media to broadcast your message to a wider audience. For example, I used cinema and the Internet...”

“No, Al, this has nothing to do with the Internet. The people in my village ooh and ah when I show them how the velcro on my sandals works. Three people in the Mayor’s Office know how to type birth certificates on a typewriter. Just forget about the Internet! If I am going to teach people anything about water sanitation and for them to actually do it themselves it has to be simple enough for a toothless, illiterate peanut farmer to understand. It has to be so simple and so obvious that they can see it for themselves with their own eyes. If it entails concepts that I learned in 9th grade Biology class then it is too complicated.”

“’Scuse me, fellas! I gotta take a pee!”

“You’re excused, James.”

James Brown proceeded to dig a little hole in the sand with his front paws, urinated, and then moved forward and with his back paws pawed sand back on top of his pee hole.

“James, what did you just do?”

“Nuthin! I just got to pee! And when I got to pee I got to dig a hole!”

“I know you dug a hole, but why?”

“I don’t know! I… I… I just got to pee! Every time I got to pee I got to dig a hole! That’s just the way it is!”

Al lectured, “The common house cat covers up its own liquid and solid waste because of its instincts as a carnivorous animal. The scent of feline urine is particularly strong due to its high concentration of urea relative to water and is used among the wild cat population to mark one’s territory; however, potential prey have over millions of generations learned to avoid areas marked by the scent of cat urine. Over time, cats began to realize this as wekk and hence they have likewise developed the instinctive behavior to bury their waste so as to hide the scent.”

“THAT’S IT!!! We need to build a network of rudimentary septic tanks!!! James Brown, you’re the most ingenious talking cat ever!!!”

“Damn straight! They don’t call me the Kitty Cat of Soul for Nuthin!”

So I emulated the ingenious water sanitation infrastructure designed by my kitten and began to build a soak pit. I went out in the back of my nyegen where the wastewater flows out into the garden and plotted out a hole. A soak pit should have a minimum of 1.7 m2 of volume for each person who uses it on an average day, and since I am the only person who lives in the mud mansion of Xanadu that meant that I had to dig a hole roughly 1.2 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Easy, right?


No. In the midst of dry season – six months since the last rainfall – the dirt is as hard as a rock. Before digging anything I had to take a pickax and smash the ground apart. But even a pickax alone did not do the trick – after smashing the ground for an hour, I would have maybe a couple centimeters of debris to excavate. It was a little easier if I dumped a bucket of water on it at night and came to smash the moistened dirt in the morning, but the water would only moisten about 5 cm below the surface each time. Eventually I was able to sit in my pit and use the ax head to chisel the walls flat. Never was I able to produce enough debris to fill a single shovel – I could only dig this pit with a small garden spade.

The most fascinating aspect of me digging a hole was… that it was so goddamn fascinating. Rumor quickly spread around the village; “Did you hear that Madu is digging a hole?” “Praise be unto Allah! This is the first time since he’s gotten off his fat bobaraba since he got here!” And unless you have been the only white guy living in an African village you’d never believe it, but pretty soon there was a crowd of people gathering around to watch me. Only to a people who enjoy watching shitty Brazilian soap operas dubbed into another Western language they don’t understand could this actually be entertaining. “Holy Goat Meat! Madu is digging a hole! I’ve never seen anything like it!” This actually made my work go significantly slower because every 15 minutes I had to stop and explain what I was doing “Well you see, I’m digging a hole…”

What was actually kind of encouraging is another phenomenon kind of like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – if you start a project out in public, other people want to finish it for you. Ten year old kids would point out that in comparison to their fathers’ thick, calloused hands hardened after decades of hard labor in the fields, my hands have the soft and delicate skin of an American who has worked in offices clicking buttons all of his life. “You can’t dig a hole!” “You should sit and rest!” and they would try to take the pickax from my hands and do it for me. After having my manhood called into question by ten year olds, I had to lock my gate so they could only watch from outside.

After two weeks of picking and chiseling downward I eventually I dug my 1.7 m2.

And me digging this hole seems to have done its job. Pretty soon everyone knew that I had a hole in back of my nyegen. Word eventually got around to the dugutigi, so he and his crew of old men came to inspect my hole. They thought that it was so awesome that they wanted one in back of every last nyegen in the village, and I was summoned to the gwa of the elders.

(dum dum DUUUUUUM!!!! To be continued!!!!!!)