Pick up the Child.

It’s so hard not to feel overwhelmed by this all. A couple weekends ago, I sat through a training seminar that dealt specifically with human trafficking in the United States, ways to identify it, and how to respond to it. By the time everything wrapped up, I felt a bit dizzy by the intensity of the information that had just been delivered to me. Did you know that if you seriously suspect that you’ve discovered a case of human trafficking, you can call not only your local police, but also the FBI? How crazy is that? Crazy awesome…

Anyway, I was chatting with Stephanie a week or so ago, and we began talking about the story behind this picture:

In 1993 a young photographer named Kevin Carter was in Sudan, documenting famine and genocide, when he came across this young, starving girl. She was struggling to make her way to a food bank while a vulture lurked in the background, watching her expectantly. But more horrifying than this picture is the fact that Kevin snapped his photo and moved on, never stopping to pick up the child.

That picture won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Ten weeks after the news that his photo had snagged one of the most coveted awards in the world, Kevin James killed himself. The note he left behind mentioned that he could not forget the things he had witnessed in Africa–the starvation, the genocide–it still haunted him.

I think that story is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, and working in this office, doing what I do, I hear sad stories almost every day. The reason it breaks my heart is because, while I in no way think that one thirty-something photographer could have single handedly brought peace and healing to a broke nation–ending genocide, famine, and preventable disease–he could have picked up that child. I’m not saying that one simple act such as that could have undone the pain of everthing he had witnessed, but who knows what long term ramifications it could have had?

I think that that’s one of the main things we have to communicate when talking about human trafficking. We may not be able to break down the door of every brothel in the world, we may not be able to prosecute all the traffickers from here to the far east, we may not be able to liberate every slave in every nation, but what we can do is pick up the child in front of us. There’s no way one person can fathom the depth and magnatude of this crime–all the people it affects and all the lives and families it destroys–but we can take that next step that is before us. It might be something as small as talking about modern slavery with someone who had no idea that it still exists in the world today, or it could be holding an event to raise money and awareness, or it could literally be helping a child right in front of you whom no one else will protect.

Please, just pick up the child.

Advertisement