We can’t solve the problem of trafficking, though there are many organizations working toward that goal. If we give up and say we can’t solve the problem and other organizations give up as well, trafficking will continue to grow. Those few people whose lives have been touched through the ministry will not be rescued. We must persevere and do the best we can. We are not here to solve the entire problem; we are here to help one woman at a time, and we need to keep doing what we can.

The safe house is doing its part, beginning with 10 women in 2013. Its latest location houses 20 women at a time. It is a start, and we are making a difference for somebody’s life, for their family and for society. If we had a larger home, we could help more girls. But first, we need to have a sustainable solution where we can stay in a home for the long term and not worry about when we might have to move again. We already have enough issues we are trying to solve without wondering when a landlord might ask about the girls in the house. To be honest, I never thought I would encounter this problem. I thought I can just rent a house anywhere as other people do.

People don’t want to rent to us because they see these girls who have been sold, and they think they are nothing … like an animal. It is an insult to them to even see the girls, so they don’t want them in their home. We are reasoning very differently; we look at them from God’s eyes, from His love.

Whenever I go and meet with the girls who are running their shops and know they are training other people, with their family receiving them back, that’s when I know we have done our job. Once they were told, “You are not my family. You have died. Go away.” But when the girls have job skills and are changed from the inside out, the way they talk and act will be different, and their families accept them again. That is really good, and we can see that they are earning their livelihood doing decent work, passing on that skill to other people – that is the main goal; I would like to see that more and more in the future.