At breakfast they shared their story.  All four are Cameroonians.  All are English speaking.  All have graduated from university.  And all found it impossible to land a job here in Cameroon.  Their families had struggled to put them through school with the expectation that they would land a good job. They were then supposed to contribute financially to the needs of the extended family.  And so each was ready to fall for the exciting promise of a job in another country.  Without doing any research into what this was really all about, each gal jumped at the chance to get out of Cameroon and make it big somewhere else.  One was hired to teach English to  school children in Kuwait.  For another it was the promise of a good paying office job in that country.  The only hitch was that money was needed to pay for passports, visas, plane tickets, and other fees.  One young lady reported that her father sold his cocoa farm which had been in the family for many generations.  He was left penniless with the firmly held belief that his daughter would soon be sending lots of money back to him.  

Nothing turned out as promised.  As each young lady arrived at the Kuwait airport she was met by a "handler" who took her passport and rushed her off to a mall.  There she was put on display for men to see her.  Soon a Kuwaiti man would like what he saw and purchase her.  Without being allowed any time to recover from her trip or to adjust to this foreign land, she would be taken to his house and immediately be made to work.  These girls were treated as slaves in their owners homes.  They had to work for 22 hours each and every day.  They worked from 4 a.m. until 2 a.m. the following day.  During that time they were not permitted to sit down.  They could only have their phones when they were off work for those two hours.  And at any moment the man would bring them into his bed and do whatever he wanted to with them.  In fact, the wives encouraged the African slave girls to have sex with their husbands.  

It's called human trafficking and it is going on today.  I sat at the breakfast table this morning and listened to these ladies describe unspeakable things that happened to them.  All four of them managed to escape, and through various means were able to return to Cameroon.  One of the girls has been ostracized from her family.  They do not ever want to see her again.  She has disgraced the entire clan.  But the most shocking part of their stories was the fact that Cameroonian men called traffickers enticed them into this job opportunity in Kuwait. In each case it was a man well known to the girl.  For one it was her cousin whom she had grown up with.  He not only sold her into this most despicable kind of slavery, he also sold his own sister and another cousin as well.  It is a business for these men.  They can make a good living this way.  One of the young ladies reported to me that her own pastor is the one who trafficked her.  He sold nine girls from his church to the Kuwaiti handler at the same time.  She is the only one who managed to escape and come back to Cameroon.  She immediately reported her pastor to the police.  He is in prison today, which is where he belongs.

These young ladies have formed a non-profit organization.  They are dedicated to warning young girls about this kind of thing.  They also are doing everything they can to help other young ladies to escape from Kuwait and come back home to Cameroon.  They have to pay the equivalent of  $3,000 U.S. dollars to their handler in order to buy their freedom.  Then they have to pay for their plane ticket back home.  All the time they are living with their owners, they are not getting paid.  

These four young ladies spent the night at Shiloh, ate breakfast, and were picked up at 7 a.m.  They were invited to speak to the young people at Rain Forrest International High School.  When our team arrived to work this morning we shared this story with them.  To our shock and horror Doris reported to us that she had been approached by a trafficker  back before she came to work at Shiloh.  By God's grace she did not to fall into this trap.