Unfortunately, human trafficking reaches nearly every place on the planet in some way. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center's board members, discuss Sandie's recent trip to Zambia and the efforts being made by humanitarians in that county to end human trafficking. Sandie and Dave also explain how Zambia is an origin, transit, and destination country.
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Transcript
Dave: Sandie, today were going to talk about your recent trip abroad and how the center is working to end HT and how we’re continually working to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in the global conversation of ending HT. So I’m so glad you are just back from your trip and can share some of these tools and resources and experiences that you’ve had.

Sandie: Thank you. I just got back from Zambia. And I have to tell you honestly, when they called and asked me to come and do training on counter HT, I had to look on the Africa continent map to make sure I actually knew where Zambia was.

Dave: I would have too. In fact, I meant to do that before we stared the show here. I know it’s in southern Africa and I think it’s on the eastern coast, is it?

Sandie:  No. It’s really pretty central.

Dave: Oh okay. See, it goes to show you my geography. And it’s pretty embarrassing because I took a class on African history in college and one of the things we had to do was an entire map of the continent of Africa. I speak for myself here but I think I can lump a lot of us as Americans into this bucket. We are very poor with African geography, most of us.

Sandie: I understand that. It’s there in the southern third of the continent of Africa and on the northwest side, the border is with the DR Congo which is very problematic and is one of the aspects of trafficking there and in the northeast they are bounded by Tanzania and east Malawi and then southeast Mozambique and then southern Zimbabwe and then Namibia and on the west, west Angola. One of the things that people often remember about Zambia is that is where the city of Livingston is located, on the very southern border and the famous Victoria Falls.

Dave: Oh interesting. I did not know that.

Sandie: But I was not here as a tourist, so I didn’t go see the falls.

Dave: Actually, we were talking about Zambia before we started recording today. One of the things that you mentioned to me was Zambia, from a standpoint of HT, is an origin country, a transit country, and a destination country. And this is language that a lot of folks who do work to end HT utilize. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by those 3 things.

Sandie: Well when we say origin country it means that it’s a source of victims and there’s a reason. There’s a reason they’re more vulnerable. A lot of the trafficking I learned about from the local people, these were first hand reports, was trafficking from rural to urban. So the poverty and the lack of knowledge in the rural areas made these families much more vulnerable to trafficking tricks. That’s what my friends call them, the tricks of the traffickers. And they wanted to know, what is the profile of a trafficker? What we began to understand is you couldn’t say, “Well a trafficker is a big guy with body guards around him.” No, sometimes a trafficker was a grandma or an aunt or an uncle or a young cousin. So there wasn’t a profile. So origin is, it’s a source country. Transit, and I just told you all the countries around Zambia, and Zambia has what they call porous borders which would indicate that there are places on the border where it’s pretty easily accessibl...