Once upon a time, one of the women on staff here, Lety,
approached me asking if I’d like to join her and another friend who were
planning to go to Puerto America, a village on the River that has less than 10
families, and has only recently learned of the love of Jesus. When I heard that
one of the main focuses for this trip was to hand out bibles to this newly
Christian community because none of them had ever read the word of God before, I
was already excited for the things that would happen on this adventure. We were
going to get to know the families a bit more, do some worship services to show
them how to praise God, have an early Christmas celebration with them, and do
some games with the kids. This week of ministry sounded like the perfect time
for me to get away from the city, experience the heart of the jungle again, and
be reminded of God’s love for the Amazon region. I couldn’t wait to go!
It occurred to me just a few days before we left for the
trip that I could make this a bit more personal to my ministry goals, and asked
Lety how she felt about me giving a presentation on preventing human
trafficking while in this community. She said she thought it would be really
good information for them to know, since I’ve shared with her how common it is
for children in particular to be trafficked from the smaller villages with
hopes of finding better education or jobs in other areas, only to be put to
work in labor or sex trafficking. This was a new challenge for me, since I’ve
only ever shared in cities before where people are relatively familiar with
what slavery used to look like, and may have heard terms like “trafficking” or “exploitation”
before. But this community doesn’t have much contact with the outside world, so
I had to re-think almost my entire speech, and present it in a very simplified
format. This made me pretty nervous, but I also knew the importance of sharing
these things with Puerto America to help them be aware of the dangers that can
easily be prevented when you know what to look for in a potential trafficker.
Before and during my presentation, there was one woman in
particular named Claudia who was very enthusiastic to hear about human trafficking,
and really wanted to make sure that all the adults in the village were there to
learn about it as well. She was very responsive while I spoke, and kept saying
things like “yes, that’s exactly how it happened”, or “that’s exactly what my
experience was like”. At the end, we asked if she would be willing to share
what her experience had been. From my understanding up to that point, I figured
she knew of someone who had been trafficked, or she personally had been exploited
at some point in her life. What she actually shared shocked me, and was
incredibly powerful.
7 years ago, Claudia’s daughter had been trafficked straight
from the village we were in. The trafficker was a widely trusted adult because
she was the previous director of the village school. Claudia started becoming
concerned when she never heard from her 13 year-old daughter, and felt that
something wasn’t right. Apparently, this director had trafficked many girls, telling
their parents these kids would get better education at a school she had
connections to in the city, and sent Claudia’s daughter into Iquitos where she
was trapped in sexual exploitation for a long time. The woman who watched these
trafficked girls (not sure if this was a brothel owner or just the guard), by
the grace of God, had a special fondness for Claudia’s daughter, and tried to
keep her safer than the other girls being sold. I say safer because she was
still submitted to terrible things, but not as often as the other girls that
were there. This guard would ask her “when is your mom coming to rescue you? Why
isn’t she here yet?” Claudia had searched everywhere for her daughter, checking
all the ports and airport with identification, but nobody had seen this girl.
Claudia told us “when your child goes missing, as a mother, you never stop
searching. You never stop looking for your baby”, even though people from the
village had told her that her search was pointless, and that she was crazy for
thinking something bad happened to her daughter without any proof. Since
Claudia shared this story through heavy tears, it was a little difficult to
understand exactly what happened in the end, but what I think she said was that
this guard helped her daughter, giving her access to a phone to call Claudia to
tell her where she was hidden. Shortly after, Claudia was able to rescue her
daughter! She is safe now, living in Iquitos with other family members, and
going to school.
This village needed to know the signs of human trafficking.
They obviously needed to know many years ago, but for Claudia’s sake, it gave
her a lot of closure to have me speak on the topic. Now the rest of the
community believes what Claudia was saying happened to her daughter, and will
be able to prevent it from happening to any of the rest of their community
members, even though that school director had left their village years ago.
This was a response I never expected in a million years to happen after one of
my trafficking presentations, but it made me so grateful that God had put it on
my heart to share this information with Puerto America. He obviously knew that
Claudia’s heart was still hurting from that experience, even though her
daughter is now safe. He knew that I had planned to go to this village just
with the intention of ministering in other ways and being completely content to
do so, but He had bigger plans. He chose to use my gift of knowledge on this
subject to heal Claudia’s wounds from the past, and keep this from happening to
their community in the future.
Our Lord continues to amaze me every day with His
faithfulness to me, and to the lost and hurting women in the far corners of the
Amazon. He intimately knows each individual heart, and never stops wanting to
draw closer to us, just as Claudia never gave up on the hope of seeing her
daughter again. I hope this story shows the fruitfulness of everyone’s support
of my heart to minister to the women here in the jungle. What an encouraging
trip this was! Please leave a comment here if this impacted you, and check out
pictures of my time in Puerto America on Facebook!
This was the group I shared my human trafficking presentation with. Claudia is directly in front of me in the photo.
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