Community-Global awareness: Stop Child Trafficking Coffee House

Today, I attended my last workshop in the multi purpose room at Baruch. Hosted by a Christian fellowship organization, the purpose of this gathering was to raise awareness and support against child trafficking world-wide. First the emcee announced the goals of the club: “transforming our campus, renewing our lives and changing the world.” After a brief intro, she then passed the mic over to a poet/author named Jonathan. He entertained and enlightened us about issues of child trafficking and sexual slavery in a manner that was stylistically street poetry. Afterwards, he provided us with some background about him being a director of an organization which gathered kids who fought to end child trafficking back in San Francisco. His goal is to gain support in NYC and other parts of the country.  Jonathan stressed that simply getting angry over said issues won’t do any good because once our anger subsides we may loose our motivation to help these children—and besides, “they deal with too much anger and shame, anyway,” he said. He went on to say a few other brilliant things like: “Slave ships still exist; they just aren’t ships anymore, but now they’re planes.” The workshop ended with more refreshments, a few informational videos projected on screen and a raffle where winners received a copy of an autographed book written by Jonathan himself.  Even though as an atheist I found the injection of prayers unnecessary and the re-current theme of “god’s love” rather self-contradictory (even completely offensive, when he said we “need god to have morals”), I can honestly say that Jonathan and I both share a similar belief that child trafficking must be stopped. And so, my friends and I provided the emcee with our contact information—a small step towards being involved in a big cause. Overall, I found this event very eye-opening but thought the religious aspect of it was very distracting; after all, child trafficking is a social issue and not a religious one.