Who am I that I survived?

“What can we students do?” This was the overwhelming question asked during Columbia’s Veritas Forum on Monday—“Fighting Modern-Day Slavery: Two Activists Share Stories from the Trenches”—which launched a week of events aimed to promote the fight against human trafficking.

The questions came at the end of two presentations on the battle against human trafficking. Kaign Christy, an attorney from the International Justice Mission, shared his experience of advocating on behalf of slaves in Southeast Asia, and Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from the New York Times, brought to light the tragedy of female oppression and the desperate need for worldwide empowerment of women. 

The two activists stressed the importance of taking a trip to see the suffering firsthand—a curious answer that seemed more appropriate to a question like, “How can people care more?” than to the question, “How can we help?”

Implicit in that answer is a slight distrust, for lack of a better word, of human nature. The speakers knew that although their stories and slideshow images—such as that of a girl with her eye gouged out by her brothel owner—are compelling now, they will, for most of us, be washed away by the oncoming waves of school and work and life, leaving an uncomfortable but diminishing lump in the back of our minds. They knew that the bits and pieces of information they offered that night would not compel most to a committed and sustained fight against injustice.

It was the personal visits to the sites of suffering that began their lifelong commitment to activism. After a missions trip to Africa, Christy left his lucrative legal practice (he had been practicing for over 20 years) for non-profit advocacy. It wasn’t that Christy was unaware that people suffered from AIDS in Africa before he visited. His trip did not reveal to him new facts—it just made the old ones real.

Kathleen Thompson, a theater director whose play “See Me! Hear Me!” was performed at a Veritas Forum Wednesday night, shared a similar story. It was only after her first encounter with human trafficking—witnessing two girls drugged and groped in a nearby car at a gas station in eastern Europe—that she knew she had to act. 
“It catapulted me from not just being aware but feeling like I just had to do something,” Thompson said. So she wrote a play to put “real faces and real stories” to the facts of trafficking. It is tempting to idolize people like Christy and Thompson, believing that their calling is reserved for people who hold book signings and are asked to speak at universities—extraordinary people, in short. As ordinary people, our task is to remain aware and to feel guilty whenever we throw away our leftovers.

Granted, it can be difficult to transform general sympathy to committed willingness to act. It may require forgoing studying abroad in Paris and visiting a country like Cambodia instead, as Kristof urged. It requires continually educating and exposing yourself, as Christy advised, because it is when suffering sinks into your bones and becomes personal, like it did for a black man in the audience during Thompson’s play, that one is compelled to act. The man told Thompson that, perhaps because of his people’s history with slavery, the play really “sat” in him.

“How can I help?” he asked. 

There’s nothing heroic about helping. The extent of an activist’s dedication merely reflects in a small way the extent of human suffering. It is not courage, but human need, that creates “heroes.” Kristof attested that in his travels, it was right alongside the “worst of humanity” that he found the “best of humanity.”

Perhaps the strongest implication of their response to “How can we help?” is that willingness is all that is necessary to help. Once one is willing, the answers to “How can I help?” will fall into place. Drawing on a biblical anecdote of Moses holding his staff, Christy asked the audience to look into their hands and offer up whatever they are holding, just as he employed his legal skills to improve other countries’ legal systems.

I looked at my hands, and I saw them holding, among other things, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” (I had to read 30 pages by the next day). My Contemporary Civilization class had been heatedly discussing the nature of justice. In that book, Aristotle criticizes the masses who do not act justly but “take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers—behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.”

Aristotle’s words remind me of Grace Akallo, an ex-child soldier from Uganda, who came to Columbia on Tuesday night to speak at another Veritas Forum.
After escaping to America and attending college in Boston, she reflected slowly onstage, “Who am I that I survived? Who am I that I get an education?”
She was speaking for herself, thinking of her friends who were left in captivity. But she was also speaking for me and for every other college student.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.