Il Progetto Futuro

Coaching for Hope

2009-12-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

Despite not playing competitive football for a Premier League side since exiting Manchester United under somewhat acrimonious circumstances to join Real Madrid in 2003, the veteran England midfielder continues to act as an ambassador for the English game.

The LA Galaxy player attended a 'Coaching for Hope’ {CfH} session in Cape Town that was designed to meet coaches and South African children who are involved with the scheme. It was organised by the English FA as it is their chosen charity for 2009.

"It is amazing to visit a project like this and see the effect football has on young people. Football has the power to change lives and these youngsters are able to learn valuable lessons through their love of the game. I feel privileged to have met these children and despite the fact we come from different backgrounds we share a love for the game of football." Beckham said

CfH not only teaches football skills, but also promotes social awareness for issues such as AIDS and substance abuse. Access to sport is limited in some areas, and so a CfH tournament aims to boost self-esteem, confidence and build life skills for those who participate.

"Aids is a very real problem in places like Khaylitsha and football must ensure it does whatever it can to help educate young people of its dangers and make a difference," Beckham concluded.

David Triesman, the FA chairman, added: "It has been inspiring visiting this Coaching for Hope session. Watching the boundless energy and promise of these young people has been an amazing experience.

"Football has a power to inspire change. I am in awe of the coaches here who have the ability to make a difference to the future of these children.

"Schemes such as Coaching for Hope make me proud of the work of The FA’s International Development Programme. It is a fantastic example of a project using the universal language of football to help promote positive change in people’s lives."

The director of the project for CfH, Jane Carter, was overjoyed for Beckham to be in attendance: "To receive such a high profile visit from one of the world’s most famous players will shine a light on the work we do in a way that nothing else could," she beamed.

"Football in South Africa is a powerful unifying force and this will provide a tremendous morale boost for the young people of the communities, the volunteer coaches, and bring the concept of a role model to a whole new level."

Source : Goal

The Hard Sell

2009-12-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

Americans traveling abroad have seen the anti-human trafficking signs in tourist destinations for years now: warnings to avoid sex with underage prostitutes or face stiff international penalties as a consequence.

Nearly 10 years after the first United Nations protocols to curb human trafficking for sex and slave labor, awareness of what has come to be known as ‘modern-day slavery’ has infiltrated our domestic borders and even trickled down to the local level. 

In Columbus, victims’ advocates and rescue organizations are increasingly working to stem what they say is a growing tide of commercial sexual exploitation of young, vulnerable native-born women—including many prostitutes. But convincing Ohioans that “pimp” is synonymous with “trafficker”--and that young prostitutes should be treated as survivors rather than criminals--has proven to be a hard sell for advocates.

From global to local 

Even Columbus’s most vocal activists against human trafficking say they had trouble wrapping their minds around the concept of contemporary slavery when they were first introduced to the movement. For Kae Denino, co-chair of the public awareness committee with the Central Ohio Rescue and Restore Coalition {a collaborative group of Columbus-area anti-trafficking groups}, the warning signs she saw during visits to Costa Rica meant little to her until she read about sex slavery in an issue of National Geographic. 

“When I got off the plane, there were all these signs that said ‘Don’t have sex with children!’ and I just thought, ‘thank you for your very sage advice.’ I didn’t really understand. It took a little while,” said Denino, who organizes local events to raise trafficking awareness, teaches classes for journalists covering the topic and is active in local and national organizations.

“Since understanding the idea of sex slavery, and from the National Geographic article {“21st Century Slaves,” published in Sept. 2003} and things that I’ve read since, my traveling life is turning toward abolition now,” said Denino. “This is what I’ll do for the rest of my life, is raise money and awareness and move towards freeing slaves as much as possible.” 

Since returning from an extended stay in St. Croix earlier this year, Denino, an adjunct professor at Columbus State, has been one of the more public faces of the local anti-trafficking movement. Denino organizes events for the Central Ohio Rescue and Restore Coalition and hopes to be appointed as the co-state director for Not For Sale Ohio, a national anti-trafficking non-governmental organization {NGO}.

Last month, Denino hosted Freedom Follies, a live music, dance and craft gala at Wild Goose Creative, the art collective on Summit Street just north of the OSU campus. The event drew the city’s young professionals, creatives and musicians, and the $10 admission fee benefited the Central Ohio Rescue and Restore Coalition {CORRC} and Columbus’s soon-to-be-opened Gracehaven House living facility for rescued Ohio trafficking victims, as well as three international rescue and restore organizations.

Both the CORRC and Gracehaven seek to rescue and rehabilitate not only immigrants and minors kidnapped or otherwise forced into slave labor, but also Ohioans who were, or are still, minors when they were coerced into prostitution by abusive boyfriends or pimps. 

“When I say I’m an abolitionist and I fight slavery, people get all excited to write a check to India—which is great—but these girls here who are walking around in maybe Old Navy clothes who look like us but are just as held down by force,” Denino said.

Nobody enters prostitution as an adolescent “because they think it sounds like a better idea than the Girl Scouts,” said Denino. “To talk to people about forced prostitution, according to some people in the movement, that’s redundant. They’re saying that no one really makes that choice—that it’s all, in many ways, forced.” 

Like other Columbus-based advocates, she maintains that there is no relevant distinction, according to the legal definitions, between “trafficker” and “pimp,” between being physically forced or psychologically coerced into the commercial sex industry. People who argue otherwise, Denino said, “just don’t have any idea of what kind of mind-frame these girls are working from.”

It’s these “in our own backyard” victims who have generated the recent boom in local awareness campaigns and media coverage. Bringing the issue home to Central Ohioans has been crucial in the lobby for tougher state trafficking laws, as well as for securing funding for domestic victim rehabilitation efforts at anti-trafficking non profits. 

But swaying a tough-on-crime public mentality into believing that many street-level prostitutes are, indeed, the victims is an uphill battle, especially since it mandates a distinction between those who enter the criminal lifestyle voluntarily and those who were exploited as minors, kidnapped or forced through violence or psychological coercion. Young victims themselves may not make the connection until they are introduced to the topic through local awareness campaigns. Just ask Theresa Flores.

“I had lived it and didn’t realize that what had happened to me was called human trafficking. I actually went to a conference as a social worker and learned more about it. {I} realized that if I didn’t realize it, then most people didn’t either. That was pretty much the conviction I needed to start telling my story and tell people what {human trafficking} looks like,” said Flores, a Columbus social worker whose sexual exploitation as a minor more than 20 years ago is detailed in her nationally distributed memoir, A Sacred Bath.

The book, which Flores said is the only memoir by an American detailing the domestic sex trafficking of a minor, has made her a public figure within the national anti-trafficking movement and a regular media source, including a recent appearance on MSNBC’s expose “Sex Slaves: The Teen Trade,” which aired in February. Her second book, The Slave Across the Street will be published on January 11, Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Flores is the director of public awareness and training for Gracehaven House and sits on the Ohio attorney general’s newly formed Ohio Trafficking Commission board as a victims’ representative.
 
Flores’s work is an effort, in part, to reform social and legal systems so that underage and young prostitutes, whether forced violently or coerced through threats, drugs or intimidation, are processed as “survivors” rather than as criminals. Not surprisingly, Flores has met with some resistance. 

“There are always the others out there who are the naysayers. So I get a lot of comments about ‘why didn’t you run?’ or ‘why didn’t you tell somebody?’” said Flores. “People who are being prostituted are victims and not doing it by choice—because who would do that by choice? It’s going to take a long time to shift people’s mentalities and ideas about that. But it is working.”

Denino shares Flores’ conviction to press through objections over applying new trafficking definitions to the age-old prostitution debate. “If somebody’s going to get nitpicky with me and say that pimps aren’t really traffickers, or that those prostitutes really asked for it because of lifestyle choices, I’m just going to go on to the next person,“ said Denino. “My job is not as much changing the public perception as much as it is about actual abolition of slaves.” 

Sensational media and the numbers problem 

The public conversation about human trafficking in Ohio changed dramatically in 2009.  
Following high-profile busts of underage, multi-state prostitution rings based in Toledo as part of the FBI’s “Innocence Lost” national initiative, Gov. Ted Strickland signed House Bill 280 into law in January. A synopsis of the bill on the governor’s website asserts that “trafficking has increased across the state, especially in northeastern counties, and a large majority of these victims are women.”

The new law allows prosecutors to add harsher trafficking charges to related offenses in order to strengthen penalties and, in part, defines human trafficking as “compelling a victim or victims to engage in sexual activity for hire; engaging in a performance that is obscene, sexually oriented or nude oriented.” It also mandates that the attorney general’s office establish a commission to study human trafficking incidences in the state.

The Trafficking in Persons’ Study Commission convened its first meeting in July. In a press release, Attorney General Richard Cordray stressed the need to define the issue as it affects the state. 

“We have indications that the problem is prevalent in Ohio, but we lack comprehensive statistics accounting for its depth,” wrote Cordray. “In addition, the majority of our law enforcement professionals have not been trained to identify and help these victims. The commission has been created to address these issues and provide further recommendations.”

The same release cites statistics from national anti-trafficking groups the Polaris Project and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center that estimate anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 American youths are at high risk for being trafficked for sex.

The FBI’s arrest of 60 pimps in the most recent of its “Innocence Lost” operations resulted in the rescue of 52 underage victims of prostitution across 36 cities, an indication that the commercial sexual exploitation of minors is a problem here. But until solid statistical measures are established, estimates from government agencies and non-profits leave the issue in a gray zone concerning a solid accounting of trafficking victims that Cordray described as “under the radar.”

Local media coverage of the issue boomed in 2009 when the focus shifted to the more narrow {and salacious} issue of sex trafficking of domestic girls rather than the {likely larger} issue of immigrants being forced into trade labor. Until this year, “slave” was not a word featured in local media coverage of young Columbus women arrested for prostitution. Now it is.

But sensationalized media coverage can hurt as much as help the problem, say some working within the anti-trafficking movement.

“Local media is simply picking up on what’s going on and what people want to hear,” said Denino, who also has written about the issue locally. “That’s a really big problem that we have, where everybody want to talk about the issue because it’s sexy and exciting and horrible…but if the media doesn’t handle it gently, it can be so derogatory towards the movement in general.”

It can also mobilize a grassroots effort of advocacy and awareness and, perhaps, ultimately, help change perceptions among law enforcement and policy makers to begin to work toward rescue and rehabilitation instead of criminal arrest. In addition to publicity campaigns and fundraising parties like Freedom Follies, Denino spends the first Friday of every month in bus stations, truck stops, cheap hotels and fast-food restaurants on Main Street downtown taping information sheets in the stalls of the women’s restrooms. Each card asks, in six different languages, “Has your ID been taken away? Is anyone forcing you to have sex? Are you free to come and go where you live?”

“What you need to do, if you want to get to those people, is have some interface with them maybe in that split second when they’re in public, but they’re alone,” said Denino. “With things like Freedom Follies, my job is to reach people like us, that we should get involved and everything. But my job with the cards is to actually find survivors and get them freed.”  

As Flores’ message has spread and more Ohio social workers learn the conditions and definitions of human trafficking, they are in a better position to report pimps to law enforcement, thereby ending the cycle of prostitution rather than criminalizing young victims she said.  

“I’m getting more calls about, ‘Gosh, do you think we have a case?’” said Flores. When Gracehaven House opens in north Columbus next July, if will be one of three homes nationally to offer rehabilitation services for young victims of commercial sexual exploitation.  

“You see it in media all the time, a 16-year-old arrested for prostitution, 14-year-old. . . it just floors me that kids are being arrested for prostitution when that’s actually, by definition, human trafficking,” said Flores. “Part of it is changing our laws to adapt to that.

We really need to see the woman as the victim and the man as the criminal. If we could start arresting the man—the john and the pimp—then I think we can start making a big dent.”

Source: The Other Paper

An Uphill Battle

2009-11-28T01:25:00.000-08:00

Slavery isn't a word that comes to mind as you stroll along Sofia's fashionable boulevards. But Bulgaria has long been a haven for traffickers who target the country's poorest people, using violence and threats to force their victims into labor, prostitution and crime rings in the West.

Bulgaria has long struggled with corruption that has allowed human trafficking and organized crime to spread beyond its borders. But experts say the police and judiciary are starting to fight these problems.

According to Risk Monitor, an NGO working to prevent organized crime and corruption in the country, trafficking may have become more visible with the collapse of communism 20 years ago. But it has a history that reaches back to the days of the regime.

"During communism in Bulgaria, it was impossible to say for ideological reasons that trafficking, exploitation or prostitution was happening - these things were very well hidden by the state," said Iva Pushkarova of Risk Monitor.

"The communist state itself supported the trafficking of human begins - not entirely for sexual exploitation, but for labor."

When the communist government was ousted in 1989, organized criminal groups took over the trade in forced human labor.

"These criminal organizations were created by the state during communism," Puskarova said. "They just separated themselves from the state after the fall of communism."

Lured abroad under false pretences

Because of her work, Pushkarova has become familiar with the stories of many women and girls who have been forced into crime or prostitution by human traffickers - girls like Rosaria, who was married off to a man 10 years her elder when she was only 16. Her husband took her to Italy, where he said she would work in a restaurant. "He took me to the owner of a restaurant, and during this meeting, the owner gave my husband a lot of money," she recalled. "I didn't understand why. They said I would live in the restaurant because it was safer than walking home every night. I was taken to a room and I started to understand I was sold as a prostitute."

Rosaria was not the only Bulgarian girl being held captive in the rooms above the restaurant. She said that when she told the others that she wanted to escape, they told her it was too dangerous. The owner of the restaurant had the support of the local police.

Eventually, one of the girls gave Rosaria a pamphlet from an organization which rescues and protects people who have been trafficked. Rosaria hid the pamphlet until she could convince a client to let her use his mobile phone. Two weeks later, the owner of the restaurant found out that the Bulgarian police were searching for Rosaria, and threw her out. She found the local police station and returned home to Bulgaria. In many cases, though, it's not safe for victims to return home after they've been rescued. And those who do, often struggle to overcome the trauma they've experienced, said Svetlin Markov of Animus. The organization in Sofia runs a crisis center, a 24-hour hotline and reintegration programs for survivors.

"We try to help empower women to be more confident about the future, to be more confident in society, and to see that even though they were victims of trafficking in this society, there are individuals who can help," Markov said.

Lack of government commitment But Markov said that, for the Bulgarian government, trafficking simply isn't a priority. That's reflected in a lack of funding for Animus, meaning the crisis center can only accommodate survivors for one month. After that, they need to find their own accommodation. It's an almost impossible task, as they have no money and there are no shelters.

"Under the anti-trafficking law in Bulgaria, the national commissioner is responsible for setting up shelters, but for almost six years, there haven't been any working shelters in Bulgaria," Markov said. "Our crisis unit is an exception."

Raising funds to fight trafficking is a difficult task in a country which saw its EU funds stopped last year because of corruption and poor administration. Both Markov and Pushkarova said funding, improved social policy and education were the keys to preventing trafficking.

"You need to address the roots of the problem and the roots of the problem are social," Pushkarova said. "They come from being completely uneducated, to being marginalised from society, to being unemployed for a very long time." She said that while there's a long road ahead, there have also been some improvements.

"My research shows that the Bulgarian judiciary and police have done an enormous amount of work in the last year," she said. "We are on the brink of a great wave of successful court proceedings, and at present, we're in the midst of social change."

Source : DW

Burma's Boat People

2009-11-24T06:02:00.000-08:00

A Slow Boat To Nowhere: Next month thousands of young Burmese Muslims, persecuted in their own land, will attempt to voyage across the sea to a better life – but a sinister fate awaits them. John Carlin investigates

Here's a formula for making a killing in times of crisis. Go to the south-eastern tip of Bangladesh, on the border with Burma, and buy an old fishing boat. It'll cost 100,000 taka, or about £900. Then budget 450 pounds, for rice and drinking water, and maybe another £450 for bribes. Then head off and trawl for clients among the most destitute communities in Bangladesh – a country so densely populated country and so poor that for Britain to be on similar economic terms it would have to have a population of 200 million with an average income around four per cent of what a Briton's is today.

But the target market we are looking at here is several times more impoverished than that. We are talking about quite possibly the most neglected people in Asia, or anywhere else. They call themselves Rohingyas, a Muslim minority from Burma, 30,000 of whom have been so cruelly persecuted by their country's military junta, in large measure because of their religion, that they have chosen to flee over the border to live in a refugee camp that they themselves built, without the help of the United Nations or anybody else. It is on a little hillside that is so hot, cramped, stinking, hungry and disease-ridden that, by contrast, the neighbouring string of squalid Bangladeshi fishing villages feels like the Costa del Sol.

Of the 30,000 people living in the Kutupalong refugee camp, a third are children under 10. They laughed and horsed around when I visited them accompanied by a photographer and an aid worker. They would not have laughed had they had any sense of the possible destiny awaiting them, just around the corner. When the mothers get desperate, when no other possibility of survival exists, they sell their children off, usually to become slaves; sex slaves, if they are little girls.

But these are not the clients that the region's investors-in-people most are interested in. What they look for is young men, typically between 16 and 25 years old, who dare to dream of a future brighter than the best that Bangladesh has to offer them – which is to pedal day and night as rickshaw drivers, earning just enough crumbs to allow their bodies to keep pedalling the day and night after that.

For these young men, the promised land is Malaysia, an Asian Tiger of shimmering skyscrapers, vast bridges and smooth motorways that is 1,000 miles south of Bangladesh but felt – when I arrived there on a Malaysian airlines Airbus 330 – like another world, in another century. There is no Airbus option for the Rohingyas, who do not have passports, not being considered citizens in their own land. This is where the fishing boats, the rice, drinking water and the bribes come in. The canny entrepreneur, who regards himself as a sort of travel agent, offers these ambitious young men a sea trip to Malaysia for a fee the equivalent of £180 a head. The boat, about 60ft long, would usually hold a dozen fishermen. But for this kind of voyage the aim is to carry up to 100 people. That means an income of £18,000 on an outlay of £1,800: a profit approaching 1,000 per cent.

One limitation of the business is that it is only feasible at year's end. December is the time to set sail, when the storms in south-east Asian waters abate, and the currents and the winds are favourable for Malaysia. As I write, boats are being bought and packages sold – as they were a year ago when more than 1,000 Rohingya refugees set off from the Bangladeshi coast. I spoke separately to half a dozen of these sea-faring adventurers; the stories of three of them are recorded here. Storms, starvation, disease, thirst, beatings, jail was what befell them. At several steps along the way they lived with what seemed then the certain knowledge that they were to die slow and terrible deaths. Another type of slow death was what they had fled from in Burma. The travellers' stories of life in their home country matched those I heard from a group of Rohingya elders at the Kutupalong camp, painting a picture that suggested images of the slave era in the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Rohingyas live in north-west Burma, in a state called Arakan, a name that sounds like a beautiful fairyland in a C.S. Lewis Narnia story, but in this case one ruled without respite by a regime almost as darkly impenetrable as North Korea's. Since its government refused to accept the results of the last democratic elections in 1990, Burma has been a country closed to foreign journalists. Talking to the Rohingyas, one can understand why. They are discriminated against because they are Muslims in a Buddhist country; because they tend to have darker skin than most Burmese {a senior Burmese diplomat described them recently as "dark brown" and "ugly as ogres"}, and because of a complex history of resistance to central control {they sided with the British in the Second World War instead of the Japanese, whom the majority of Burmese favoured}. They find themselves stateless slaves in the country where they were born. They cannot move from one village to another without permission from the local military authorities; they cannot marry or have children without permission; they are helpless to resist as their land is confiscated bit by bit and given to Buddhist settlers brought in from the cities; they are forced to work the land that has been stolen from them, without pay; they are forced to do all the menial labour that the military might require, from building roads to cutting grass; and they are not allowed to worship freely. After nightfall, when their religion demands that they go to the mosque and pray, they are not allowed to leave their homes. And there is a policy clearly aimed at the erosion of Islam in Arakan state: anyone who is caught performing any repairs on a mosque, from fixing a roof to painting a wall, is punished with jail and a fine.

"They tell us it is their country, not ours," said one of the Rohingya boat people I spoke to, a gentle, devoutly religious boy of 19 called Mohammed. The eldest of eight siblings, his father marked him out as the family's saviour. His his mission was to set off for Malaysia, find a job and send money back home. "My father was terribly sad but he said I was the only hope the family had."

Made aware, through a relative in Bangladesh, of the going rate for the trip to Malaysia, Mohammed's father sold two bullocks and half an acre of land for the equivalent of the £180 that the supposed ticket to paradise cost. The boy tramped over the mountains to Bangladesh where, before boarding a boat in December along with 82 other Rohingya men and boys – the youngest 12, the oldest 60, most about 18 – he made a call on his relative's mobile phone to his family. "I had a feeling that I was leaving my family forever, that I would never see them again."

{Of the 30,000 people living in the Kutupalong refugee camp,
a third are children under 10}

Salim – thin, small, neat, reedy-voiced – is the second of the travellers in this story. Seventeen when he left Arakan last year, he has four brothers and four sisters. "My elder brothers were forced to cut the lawns of the soldiers, collect firewood for them, clean their houses. They were like slaves," he explained to me "I saw that my future was dark and I decided to leave and find another life." He made it to Bangladesh, found some human-smugglers, as he calls them, and contacted his family to tell them how much money he needed. "They sold their paddyfields: all the land they owned."

Moniur, older than the other two at 23, had left Arakan 10 years earlier and had worked as a rickshaw driver, one of thousands you see swarming the roads of south-eastern Bangladesh. He had the gaunt, grim-set face of all the rickshaw drivers, men forced to push the boundaries of the physically possible, with minimal food.

The three set off on separate boats along what was supposed to have been the same scheduled route: south down the Bay of Bengal to the Sea of Andaman, skirting the west coast of Thailand; then on to the Straits of Molucca, passing Indonesia to the west, before finally making landfall somewhere in the northern Malaysian province of Penang. The voyage was 1,500 kilometres long; the quantity of food provided and the conditions on the boats responded in each case to one simple purpose: maximising the traffickers' profits.

They were not shackled, they were there of their own will, but their plight recalled that of the Africans transported across the Atlantic on the slave-traders' ships. The measure of the despair driving them to seek better lives was that they did not flee for home on seeing and smelling the vessels they had been allotted. Take the case of Salim, crammed along with 107 others into the reeking hold of a fishing boat – the place the fish were usually stored before the boat headed for shore during the long years of the wooden vessel's working life. The men were packed in so tightly that they could not budge an inch. Some were seasick and vomited; all had to urinate and defecate, where they sat.

Mohammed, Salim and Moniur knew they were taking a gamble, but they had no idea just how loaded the dice were against them. On Mohammed's and Salim's boats, the food and water ran out after 10 days; on Moniur's, after eight. In each case they were still some 500 kilometres short of Malaysia, and for two days they sailed without anything to eat or drink. Reaching their destination ceased to have any significance; survival was all that mattered. "All we saw was water and more water", said Mohammed, "but none that we could drink."

Moniur's boat ran into some Thai fishermen, who gave them water but then handed them over to the Thai navy, who took them to shore and arrested them; Mohammed's and Salim's boats made it to shore in Thailand, but they and all their fellow passengers were immediately arrested. All of them were transported to a town called Ranong by road; in Moniur's case, crammed into a garbage truck. They had lost whatever minimal control they might have managed to retain over their lives.

Mohammed told his story vividly, giving free vent to his sorrow and despair; Moniur, older and toughened by the life of the urban rickshaw driver, had an extraordinary memory for detail, but remained stiffly detached, like a police detective describing a crime scene; Salim, the youngest of the three, was contained and precise, but struggled to maintain his poise during the more harrowing parts of his narrative. None of them, in the six hours I spent with them overall, ever smiled. What happened to them, happened to hundreds of other Rohingyas.

According to the only organisation in the world that takes a sustained interest in documenting the plight of the Rohingyas – a one-woman NGO called the Arakan Project run by a Belgian woman, Chris Lewa – at least 1,195 of the refugees left Bangladesh bound purportedly for Malaysia on at least 10 boats in December 2008. Of those, 859 are today accounted for; the rest, more than 300 people, are missing, presumed dead, from drowning, or starvation and thirst on the high seas. The stories of Mohammed, Moniur and Salim, whose survival was in each case providential, offer vivid insights into the probable circumstances of those who remain unaccounted for.

Moniur and Mohammed were taken by the Thai army from Ranong to Koh Sai Dang, which is also known as Red Sand Island – "a hill on the sea", as Moniur described it.

"What struck us first was the number of shoes we saw lying on the beach – hundreds of them," said Mohammed. "Since they were the type that our people wear we feared the owners had been killed and that that would be our fate too."

The Thai military kept the Rohingya men on the island for 15 days, routinely beating them. "There were many more of us than the soldiers, so it must have been to intimidate, to control," explained Mohammed. Then a military boat and a ferry arrived, and took them back to four of the the same boats they had come ashore in. "We found when we got on that they had taken out the engines. Then they connected the four boats with ropes and one of the military boats towed us all out to sea. They told us they were taking us to Malaysian waters. But after a day and half they cut the ropes and abandoned us, drifting in the high seas".

"It was then," continued Mohammed, "that we understood that the promise of Malaysia had been false and we all began to cry. The four boats were taken by the currents in different directions, until ours was alone. We were certain we would die." Moniur, on another of the four boats, had an identical tale to tell.

Their stories have been corroborated by Chris Lewa's exhaustive research, and the Thai government has even owned up. Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was forced to admit that in "some instances" such events had taken place. Though, as far as anybody knows, no official inquiry has taken place.

Should there be such an official investigation, the upshot would probably have to be charges of murder and attempted murder on a massive scale. There were 575 people on the four drifting boats. On Moniur's, the largest, there were 152. After 10 days of lacerating tropical sun and 10 nights of darkest despair, people began to die. "We had no food or water; 19 people died," said Moniur, in his staccato manner. "We threw the bodies overboard. All the rest of us could do was wait for our turn to die too."

Mohammed's boat was luckier, at first. It took just five days for rough seas to sweep them towards some Thai fishermen, who fed them and led them to shore, where the Thai military again arrested them, then handcuffed them, blindfolded and interrogated them. They had drifted far south, to near Bangkok, but were loaded onto lorries and then a military boat which delivered them once more to Red Sand Island. He and 200 others {"lots of the people there had sores on their backs from sitting crammed on the boats"} were kept on the island for a month. "Then they loaded us onto a big barge and towed us out to sea, this time with food – seven sacks of rice and two drums of water. But they took our engine out again," Mohammed said, "and after two days and one night, again, they cut us loose and left us.

"We drifted for 14 days. Many of us got sick, many lost consciousness. I had no doubts I would die. There was no hope of land or rescue. We had no energy even to talk any more." But then it rained, they gathered the water in the plastic sheeting, and hope returned. On the 16th day they saw land, and at dawn the next day they awoke to discover they were surrounded by fishing boats. They were not Thais this time. The fishermen took them ashore to their home, a place called Idi, in northern Indonesia.

Moniur meanwhile reached land after 14 days adrift. "We found water to drink, wild fruit to eat," he recalled, "and we walked, stumbling through the bush, from nightfall to dawn. We saw some markings on a tree, which told us, to our joy, that this was a deserted island. We kept walking, with new energy now, and found some villagers who gave us tea and bananas... This was India. The Andaman Islands." The former rickshaw driver spent the next nine months in an Indian detention centre.

Mohammed did make it to Malaysia, to Penang province, where I interviewed him. Following his rescue by Indonesian fishermen he awoke, after two days unconscious, in an Indonesian hospital bed. Then he met an Indonesian policeman who, instead of beating him, took him home and, together with his wife, nursed and fed him back to health. Two weeks later he moved to a refugee camp, where he stayed for six months.

Every Friday he was allowed out to visit the policeman and his family, until one day the policeman helped him realise his dream, giving him the money and the means to cross illegally, but safely ,through the Straits of Molucca into Malaysia. Salim was not set adrift on an engineless boat. After spending 21 days in the immigration detention centre in Ranong in Thailand he was put on a fully-functioning boat that, he was told, would take him up the coast to Burma. He was landed, instead, on the Thai coast and handed over by the Thai immigration authorities to Thai traffickers – one of numerous examples I came across during my interviews with Rohingyas, and confirmed as pattern by Lewa, of collusion between people-smugglers and Thai officials. "They packed 10 of us into a hidden compartment underneath a van and drove us to a rubber plantation," recalled Salim. "They took us to a long house there, where there were lots of other people like me, who had tried to get from Bangladesh to Malaysia. They asked us for the phone numbers of friends or relatives in Malaysia. They said that if we gave them the numbers they would phone and ask for the price of getting us over the border into Malaysia."

"I had no friends or relatives in Malaysia, and I said as much," Salim continued. "But they did not want to believe me. They beat me with a cane, every day for 10 days." At which point the traffickers conceded defeat. The frail boy, 18 years old now and hardly bigger than an average 13-year-old in Europe, had been the pride and hope of his family in Burma, but that was the extent of his worldly connections. So the traffickers put into action their 'Plan B': they delivered Salim and nine other Rohingyas to a Thai fishing harbour and handed them over to a trawler.

"At first I was happy. It was very hard work. Just three days off in the month. We left for sea at five in the afternoon and worked till 10 next morning, casting the nets, pulling in the fish, cleaning the nets, cleaning the boat. We slept from 10 in the morning till four in the afternoon."

He paid less than £1 a day for his expenses and he awaited eagerly his pay packet at the end of the month.But then he saw, when the end of the month came, that the Thai fishermen on the boat got paid and he did not; that they went off to shore to see their families but he was not allowed off the boat.

"When I asked for my wages I was told, 'No, you are not like the rest of the crew. Your wages are paid elsewhere'. They said I had been sold, that my boss took all my money. I asked who my boss was and they told me the name of the Thai trafficker who ran the rubber plantation with the Sikhs." What did he feel at that moment? "I suddenly felt the whole sky fall on my head: I could not move for a long time. They told me nothing more. I thought I was sold for the rest of my life. I believed I was sold forever. I cannot remember a day for the rest of the time I was there that I did not weep silently."

There was no prospect of escape, he said. "I heard stories of others like me who had been thrown overboard because they tried to get away." Nine months into his captivity on the boat, to his utter surprise, some people came in a van, employees of the trafficker who "owned" him and took him on a long journey over the border into Malaysia. "They are cruel people, they beat people, they buy and sell people, they are killers, but with me they were true to their word. My nine months of work had paid the money it would have cost to get me over the border if I had had relatives to pay."

It was a peculiar case of honour among thieves. They dropped him off at a mosque inside Malaysia's Penang province, where once it was revealed that for all the callousness in the world there is also kindness. Salim, whose life had been held to ransom, met an elderly man at the Malaysian mosque who took him under his wing. "He gave me a phone to call my family; he gave me some work to do, and paid me some wages, then he gave me some money to go on a bus south to Georgetown – a big city where I hoped to find steady work, which I soon did."

He succeeded where Moniur, older and tougher, failed. Back in Bangladesh where I interviewed Moniur just a month after his return from India, he allowed himself just one moment of weakness, when I asked him if he would contemplate setting sail for Malaysia again?

"Look," he said, "many times, many times I thought I would die. Many times. So, no. No, no. I will not try again. I will stay now and always in Bangladesh. Life is hard here, but it is life."

The Kutupalong refugee camp itself is life too. It is a pretty bright and cheery sort of life after you've emerged out of the dark places that Moniur, Mohammed and Salim descended into. Almost bright and cheery, if you hold your nose and shut out your eyes to the misery all around – to the open hillside gutters and the baking-hot shacks with mud floors and black plastic roofs – and if all you do is look at the smiles on the faces of the 10,000 children there.

They mob us foreign visitors, whose every gesture they find hilarious. One girl, of maybe 11, wearing violet-blue glass earrings, struck us as strikingly beautiful. We took photographs of her, for which she posed with confidence, but as we left the camp, we feared for what the future might hold for her. The thought passed through one's mind that if sex traffickers were as active here as the people-smugglers, which we were told was the case, then what hope for this girl?

And even if she were lucky and escaped the clutches of evil men – who reportedly sell Rohingya girls to places as far away as China – what kind of a future could she hope to have?

The children's smiles and laughter were little different to those of children with access to soap and water and food and education and Nintendos in the greenest suburbs of Surrey. But fast-forward a decade in your imagination and the little girl with the violet-blue earrings transforms into Nur Ayesha, a woman of 23 I met inside a sweltering shack. Nur, a woman of delicate features in a hard face, told me she had left Arakan four years ago to get married, as she and the man she loved lacked the marriage licence money that the Burmese military demanded of them {assuming they would have been lucky enough to have secure official permission to marry}. But after a year of life in Kutupalong, her husband decided to set off alone in search of a better life for them both. She did not know, or would not tell, whether he had gone on a boat to Malaysia or tried to get there overland, as some also did. But the fact was that he never returned.

She assumed he had died, leaving her with a two-year-old child for whom she could not care. "I was sick and so was the child. I had no money for treatment. I was hungry and had no money to buy food," she told me, bringing to mind an image I had seen at a nearby port of another young woman, waist deep in water with a child in her arm, begging for fish from an arriving boat. So Nur took the option of last resort. "I was told that there were people who bought little children. I sold my two-year-old boy to some people who said they were from the city."

Nur tells herself that the people who bought the child will rear him well; that they bought him because they were unable to have children themselves. Workers for NGO's who know Bangladesh well say this is unfortunately unlikely to be true; that the mother is either deceiving herself or lying. The child, they assured me, is condemned to a life of slavery, possibly even sex slavery. I asked Nur how much she had sold her child for. She replied, registering no horror or sense of injustice, as if the price had been fair one, that she had sold him for 500 taka – about £4.

"I am sad, I will always be sad, but what could I do?" She might have avoided the need to do that had her husband made it to Malaysia and sent money back to her in the refugee camp. But, was life really better for the Rohingyas in Malaysia? Was the pursuit of that dream worth the cost and the sacrifice and the risk? Mohammed and Salim, having made it there, seemed to think that, on balance, the answer was yes. Mohammed had found some occasional work on a building-site, and has met up with a small Rohingya community and found a little mosque where he can pray in peace, whenever he wants. His regret is that he has not managed to live up to his family's hopes yet, and has not been able to send any money home.

Salim, who has found a job in a tea shop, has sent money home, only to discover that a third of it is immediately lifted in "tax" by the local Burmese military who exercise such close Big Brother control over the Rohingya population that they can detect, through phone-tapping and spies, when a family acquires new money.

Did he consider himself, nonetheless, fortunate? Salim thought long and hard before answering. "I consider myself fortunate that I was let go from the boat and brought here, and that many died and I survived. But my greatest fear is that I will be arrested here and end up working as a slave on a fishing boat again, and that then I may not be so lucky, that I might have to do that forever."

I asked him if he would ever return to Burma. "I would like to see my family again," said small, neat, deliberate Salim, a bright boy with dark sad eyes who at 18 has already lived a thousand lives. "But how? No, it is not possible. This is my life now." It is his life now, just at it is the life of some 25,000 Rohingyas who have found a precarious home in Malaysia.

I went to a school in Penang province, or rather a little house, where a dozen or so Rohingya children spent their days doing what the children at Kutupalong wished they could do: learning writing, maths, English, the Koran. On a wall there was a chart with the flags of all the countries of the world on it. I asked a teacher to point out to me his flag. I asked a child. I asked all the children. Each silently and without hesitation placed their finger on the flag of Burma, a country from which they have fled, that does not want them and that humiliated and exploited them every day of their lives.

Source: The Independent, UK

40% of children on breadline in Kyrgyzstan

2009-11-24T05:35:00.000-08:00

At least 40 percent of children in Kyrgyzstan live below the poverty line, Tim Schaffter, the United Nations Children's Fund {UNICEF} Representative in Kyrgyzstan said Thursday at the forum devoted to the 20th Anniversary of the Adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Children in Bishkek.

The number of children living in impoverished conditions reached 900. “Level of children’s education has gone down dramatically. Today 90 percent of high-school children do not have the required knowledge.

Meantime, lack of teachers remains another urgent problem of the republic,” Mr Shaffter said.

The speaker paid special attention to increasing maternal deaths in Kyrgyzstan. “Up to 40 thousand families do not have birth certificates for their children,” he said.

Source: 24 News Agency

Promise

2009-11-24T05:23:00.001-08:00

Kids deserve more than just talk

Last week, Sun Media columnist Thane Burnett made Canadians aware we are on the verge of breaking a giant promise to kids. His series, Suffer The Children, which appeared across the country, marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Fifty years later, Burnett travelled to Indonesia to see if talk was truly cheap or if Canadians have been making a difference.

While the series illustrated hopeful benchmarks, it also highlighted shortcomings in our covenant. For every step forward there is always a step back. Or two. We help people help themselves, but don't provide access to global markets. We preach literacy, clean water, infrastructure development, medicine and provide dollars to improve conditions, but just when we seem on the cusp of hope, some geopolitical dynamic comes into play. While hope floats, hopelessness for many of the the world's children perpetuates.

There are no easy solutions.

While education is paramount, there are still too many people in the world who feel impoverished people having too many babies is not their problem. That head-in-the-sand attitude is a dark harbinger. Ignorance will invariably lead hopeless people to desperation. We have seen this over and over again. A recession means now, more than ever, it is our weakest, poorest, voiceless children who need our help. Exploitation of children for sex or slave labour is a reality in our world today, even if we choose to pretend it isn't.

Last week, the UN issued a report that 200 million children have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition and there are one billion hungry people in the world. More than a third of all deaths of impoverished kids is linked to malnutrition. This problem will not go away because we want it to. In fact, every passing day of ignorance makes it worse.

Burnett's series offers hope but we all must do more than talk. So when you hear John Lennon asking in song what you have done this Christmas, you might want to have a credible answer.

Promise.

Source: Toronto Sun

Freedom Is Necessary

2009-11-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.

There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than 'you' can keep track of — thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas.

Déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme adoptée par l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies, le 10 décembre 1948

CSR, Sponsorship & Support Opportunities

2009-10-31T22:24:00.000-07:00

"En Souffle et Sagesse, In Soffio e Saggezza, In Breath and in Wisdom"

Despite our differences, we are all in this together. No act of kindness or compassion ever goes unnoticed. To change the world, take compassionate action within your immediate sphere of influence. To change yourself, start by being still and making time just to listen [1]

⎯ If you believe you have the relevant skills and may be interested in aiding us in our efforts as Supporters for The Future Project, we would like to hear from you.

Please write to:

Lutetia Bresciani, at The Alchemist | www.AainaA.info
IP Conceptual Architect for The Future Project

We need support, help and sponsorship{s} in order to undertake the Future Project to full fruition for the betterment of the Earth, and Humanity. We envisage launching as early as November 2009 onwards for the Documentary {Content Creation - proceeds of syndication will go to the setting up of the Future Project Foundation, and creating projects which will benefit humanity in the future}. We are seeking your support in .. {though these aren't limited}:

1} Graphic Design {Flash, & Multimedia conversion on sev. platforms}
2} VPS or Semi-Managed Hosting and support
3} Public Relations, & Marketing
4} System Administration & Web Development
5} Writers, Contributors, Editors

CSR Sponsorship program to launch Il Progetto Futuro - The Future Project are not limited to these industries

a} Airline, Coach, Train Travel {and maybe 'Boat' ?}
b} Imaging - Multimedia imaging devices, and media storage
c} IT Industry - Multimedia input devices, portable or desktop stations, and media storage
d} Hotellerie - B & B, Hostel, or Hotels
e} Insurance & Assurance industries
e} Press & Media

Partnership, Sponsorship Opportunities for Corporations, and Agencies, are highly encouraged - Brand positioning, especially when Il Progetto Futuro is implemented will take flight in not less than 20 countries, with real-time streamcast online.

The human drama is reaching its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities for a magnificent future. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance, calling us to a better way of living.

Remember that when you leave this earth you can taken nothing of what you have received, but only what you have a given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage [2].

NotaBene:

[1]. Edmund Bourne, Global Shift: How A New Worldview is Transforming Humanity.
[2]. St.Francis of Assisi, Italy

Playing With Earth, photo courtesy and copyright Flavio Takemoto

Towards Global EU Action

2009-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

The conference 'Towards Global EU Action against Trafficking in Human Beings' was held in Brussels, October 19-20, to coincide with the third annual EU Anti-Trafficking Day.

This conference objectives were to address EU efforts to combat human trafficking and increase cooperation with countries where trafficking originates as well as with countries through which trafficking passes. To protect vulnerable groups such as women and children, the EU aims to strengthen ties between the police and judicial authorities of the Member States, as well as to strengthen international cooperation.

H.M. Queen Silvia of Sweden

Sixth Sense, and The Future

2009-10-31T18:15:00.000-07:00

The Past Conception of The 6th Sense

Sixth Sense is a mini-projector coupled with a camera and a cellphone—which acts as the computer and your connection to the Cloud, all the information stored on the web. Sixth Sense can also obey hand gestures, like in the movie Report.

Definition ...

somatognosis

/so·ma·tog·no·sis/ {so″mah-tog-no´sis} the general feeling of the existence of one's body and of the functioning of the organs. Sense {sens}: Dorland's Medical Dictionary for Health Consumers. © 2007 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved. Any of the physical processes by which stimuli are received, transduced, and conducted as impulses to be interpreted to the brain; in molecular genetics, referring to the strand of a nucleic acid that directly specifies the product.

Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position--at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary path in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos - Edmund Bourne, Global Shift: How A New Worldview is Transforming Humanity.

How can we envisage seeing a similar concept implemented for the betterment of humanity, in the near future ?

Comments highly appreciated.

Philosophy

2009-10-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

"En Souffle et Sagesse, In Soffio e Saggezza, In Breath and in Wisdom"

To heal, restore and preserve balance and harmony ⎯ We have never lost sight of the founding principles ⎯ to be able to serve the very essence of humanity, in turn restoring the balance herein a just and civilized world reflecting the very epitome of sovereignty of the Universal Kingdom. Il Progetto Futuro {The Future Project}, re-connects us both in Breath, and Wisdom ⎯ granting us the very insights of being, human.

Attachment to beliefs and ideologies have led to global war, famine, political, social and economic upheavals, destruction of our habitat and general dysfunction on all levels of society because they divide us from each other. Retarded and infantile societies fear loss of possessions, status and cling to material advantage; whereas cultivated and advanced peoples fear loss of freedom, justice and peace [1]

Borders, governments and the constant need to define ourselves by our differences {human judgement} is the greatest enemy of peace. The awareness that we are all Human and the realization that our greatest similarity is to love and to forgive, is our greatest tool for unity & calm.

If your life's story were written, would you read it?

Notes

[1] St.Clair, Zen of Stars
[2] Warren Whitfield.

Evening Field, photo courtesy and copyright Mateusz Stachowski

The Future Matters, NOW

2009-10-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters. The Future Project {Il Progetto Futuro} is an awakening call to the Leaders of the New World. From global warming, to Human Trafficking, through poverty, to Wars - through every permissible vice created for the pleasures of the Ego, that never seem to edge especially in relation to what we embrace as Faith.

Everybody's path is basically the same. We all must learn certain attitudes while we're in the physical state, herein this planet in Space. Some are quicker to accept them than others. Charity, Hope, Faith, Love.We must all know these things & know them well. It's not just one hope and one faith and one love-so many things feed into each one of these.There are many ways to demonstrate them.

Yet we've only tapped into a little!

Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position--at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos - Edmund Bourne, Global Shift: How A New Worldview is Transforming Humanity.

To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance. But if a peaceful world is beyond politics it is also beyond religions as these presently exist. A change is needed in every phase of human life. This lies mainly in recognition that the micro phase, the particular or national traditions, must find their context and fulfillment in the macro phase, the global or panhuman phase of human existence. The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community - Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community.

Photo courtesy, and copyright Fran GC

The Future Project

2009-10-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

En Souffle et Sagesse, In Soffio e Saggezza, In Breath and in Wisdom

Objectives

To create social awareness about the State of the World from the 'eyes' of a Child of the Universe
To incite NGOs, Governments and States to positively react, through the Documentation {IP/Content} project in ameliorating the situation, by undertaking current and future projects in their countries
To encourage concern for the Future of Earth, and its Children and Women
To encourage humanity to take positive and collaborative actions to 'repair' their world
To encourage educational establishments worldwide, in initiating local chapters
To encourage active sponsorship and participation of Corporate Social Responsibility
To establish a form of persistent online identity and platform that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and offline platform where members can communicate, react, and undertake positive actions, and participate in the project within their communities
To establish an Ambassadorial Presence amongst Youth Leaders, to identify potential Ambassadors members {from amongst professionals, business or graduates}.
To bridge, unite and preserve harmony between Nations.
To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the healing process of the World, and its people.