I knew when I arrived in Albania that this summer would be a unique experience when, as we drove down the highway from the airport, we passed a man guiding a horse and cart overloaded with freshly harvested green hay. When I arrived in the UK on my way back to the States, everyone asked me the same questions: Did you like Albania? Was it really bad? Did you meet traffickers? I do my best to answer their questions but, as one colleague of mine has aptly put it, how can you explain Albania to someone that has never been there? My answers certainly fall short of what the totality of this experience has been.

In that gap between words and reality, images and memories fill the space. I remember seeing Roma boys, about five and seven if I had to guess, in the main square in Tirana, barefoot and smoking cigarettes, right next to a policeman who was directing traffic. Gangs of children, maybe trafficked for begging and forced labor, attempting to sell my friends and I cheap necklaces in southern Albania. The trafficked girls and women that I have met along the way, their shy smiles, their heartbreaking youthfulness.

I have left behind so many stories, so many lives that will go on and I will never know how these women coped, how they survived; it’s like walking away from a conversation in mid-sentence. I am sure they will all forget me, all these girls and women that I have met, the survivors of trafficking. Even though I have used it in my own blog in deference to the accepted terminology within the field, I hate the term “victim,” it’s weak, passive – an imposition on a blank page. These women and, in many cases, children, have the spirits of survivors and wills of iron that get them out of bed every morning, that help them function day-to-day after surviving horrors that you and I will thankfully never experience. It takes the greatest of strength to go on when you have been rejected by your own family, ostracized by society and attempt to support yourself with few marketable skills in a society with rigidly defined gender roles.

One of the most resonant themes from my time in Albania are the amazing, pioneering women who are making a difference for trafficked women. I can not begin to enumerate all the astounding things they have achieved, particularly when you consider that these women are coming from a culture that teaches them they are “less than,” so I will stick to a few illuminating examples. In southern Albania, a woman is operating one of the largest shelters for trafficked and at-risk women in the country. She opened the shelter under her own initiative after judging there was a need in the community for the types of services and protection a shelter could offer to women. Even after the state withdrew police protection and she had to take on the additional burden of paying for private security, she persevered. Now she is undergoing expensive chemotherapy treatments abroad while spending much of her time attempting to secure increasingly scarce funding for the shelter. And yet, she perseveres. In another case, the director of a transit center sold her 17-year-old son’s car to cover the short fall in funding and keep the center running until the end of the month. Her son had died in an accident while at school earlier in the year and she held on to the car to remember him by but was willing to let it go in order to help women whom she felt were in need.

We need to do more to support and help these women. It is amazing that in a country where there is a national strategy to combat trafficking and development aid organizations from all over the world are becoming involved in the fight against trafficking, pioneering women with more heart than money are holding the system together with tenacity, courage and sticky tape.

In closing, this summer has clearly illustrated for me that human trafficking is a complex phenomenon that will require attack at various levels, institutions and nations. As a colleague informed me, all of the world is complicit in the crime of trafficking. It is not enough to address trafficking only in the source countries, we must also look at the markets that drive demand in destination countries and improve our legislation to protect these women.

Additionally, it is imperative that we critically evaluate aid that flows from developed countries into developing nations on this issue and make sure that it is getting to the people that really need it to help the survivors. After seeing how many of these programs operate on the ground, it is obvious that a lot of international aid money is, frankly, wasted and the real pioneers that desperately need money and fight so hard for these women and their rescue, rehabilitation and reintegration miss out.

There are also many social, economic and cultural changes that will need to take place in Albania to help end the phenomenon of human trafficking, including improved parenting, gender equity, education, and poverty reduction, among others, several of which are discussed in my previous blogs. We, the international community, have to come to terms with the fact that this will be a gradual change that will take place over generations and it is unreasonable to expect a “big push” that will solve human trafficking. What can we, as individuals, do to make a difference? Read as much as possible on the issue, let your representatives know that you find human trafficking unacceptable and pressure them for legislation that fights trafficking and punishes demand (not the women who are used), volunteer for local organizations that work on this issue, and tell your friends about human trafficking.

First and foremost, we have to highlight this issue. We can not pretend that it does not exist. It is everywhere, developed and developing countries alike, and even though it is horrible to accept, we must open our eyes. All around us there are women and children in human bondage and, though their chains are invisible, they exist. It is unacceptable that there are more people in bondage today than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. As the great Fredrick Douglas once said, “I expose slavery…because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.”

While I was in Macedonia and Kosovo, I met with various NGOs and organizations, including IOM (Skopje and Pristina), an NGO working in domestic violence and several organizations that deal specifically with trafficking in persons. Without exception, they denied that the trafficking route from Albania through Macedonia and on to Kosovo (and from there, the EU) had shown a marked increase since the speedboat moratorium. It was a route that had been in use for some time but that was not unduly impacted by the (temporary) change in laws. One of the difficulties in examining the phenomenon of trafficking is that, as laws have changed and police forces have become more aware of the issue, traffickers have increasingly gone underground. It makes trafficking harder to study and, therefore, harder to fight. What is the real story? It’s almost impossible to say. While organizations based in Albania claim that Albanians are trafficked through Kosovo, this is not borne out by the organizations working on trafficking in those countries. Who is telling the truth? Who knows what the truth is? I do believe, however, that speedboats are still traveling between Albania and Italy, carrying both drugs and human beings, though perhaps not quite as frequently as before the moratorium on their usage.

During my last day in Pristina, such a lovely, wonderful city that is difficult to believe the chaos and conflict that took place here not so long ago, I met with a woman, let’s call her Molly, who runs a trafficking survivor assistance NGO. Molly started the organization after she lost her job (she worked as an economist for the Ministry of Labor) when the Serbs fired all the Albanians working in government positions shortly before the war broke out in Kosovo. Initially, Molly’s organization dealt with returning refugees and then they began to see an increase in trafficked women as women and girls, both from Kosovo and abroad, who were bought and sold to feed the demand of foreign soldiers and peacekeepers. Kosovo is a destination as well as a transit and source country which, like Albania, has seen a growing trend in the number of women trafficked internally.

Then Molly told me a story about a well known and well respected businessman in Pristina who, to all outward appearances, is a successful business owner and entrepreneur. He is also heavily involved in trafficking women and girls. Several of these women were being helped by her organization. This businessman held on to the children of these women so that they would be too afraid to escape in case he harmed their children as retribution. He had called these women repeatedly, telling them that they would never make the money they made with him with anyone else, that he was the only one that understood them. Bravely, Molly phoned him and told him that these girls were fragile, that they were damaged psychologically and that they really needed some help. He agreed that they were “damaged goods” but he said that he wasn’t too worried because he knew they would return to him because only he could provide for them. Molly told him that he should be careful because one of them may call the police out of a desire for protection and that could cause him problems. He laughed and informed her that “the police are my friends. What do I have to fear?” And yet, to the outside world, this man was a role model to the community, somebody whose business success they would like to emulate.

On one of the main thoroughfares in Pristina, there is a huge billboard on the side of a building of former Kosovar President Ibrahim Rugova, an ethnic Albanian who was widely popular. Despite converting to Christianity later in life, he remains beloved, even in a predominantly Muslim nation. He is wearing the trademark scarf that he kept on even in summer. He wore this scarf to represent the “bondage of Kosovo” and he proclaimed that, when Kosovo was free, he would remove his scarf. He didn’t live to see this goal entirely accomplished, having died in 2006 of lung cancer.

While people in this region don’t wear scarves in summer, they do wear blinders. If people continue to idolize material goods without questioning where they come from, if they continue to lionize traffickers for their material wealth, if the government continues to pronounce trafficking dead, how can we fight it? Before trafficking can be effectively eliminated in the Balkan region, the bondage of outward appearances, the slavery to the superficial must be addressed.

The other day, while riding the city bus, I watched a woman get on the bus while another passenger that was already on the bus noticed a stray hair on her shoulder and plucked it off for her. These two women were complete strangers. Albanians are very concerned, sometimes overly so, with surface appearances. In fact, women here frequently check one another out to determine how much your outfit cost or how many designer labels you are sporting. It took me a while to get used to these searching examinations from other women.

This obsession with comparison and surface appearances has dire consequences in the case of trafficking. For example, the police in Albania have cut down on their referrals of trafficked women through the proper channels because they want to keep the number of victims, particularly those returned from abroad, low. In their aspirations of entering the European Union, it is in their interests that the phenomenon appears to be decreasing. In a recent visit to the United Kingdom, some officials from the Albanian government declared that trafficking abroad was no longer a problem for Albania. Not only is this untrue, it is dangerous. When donors hear this news, they shift their funds elsewhere and efforts to prosecute the traffickers, as well as others responsible, are hampered. This preoccupation with outward appearance, with reputation and the view of one’s family in the eyes of others, also contributes to shame and stigma against the girls who do return home from trafficking for sex work.

There are many rumors and half truths that you become aware of once you begin to delve into the trafficking issue in the Balkan region. A particularly pervasive theory is that women and girls are frequently trafficked from Albania to Macedonia to Kosovo. Although this route was used in previous years, since the moratorium on speedboats (frequently used to traffick women as well as drugs) between Albania and Italy for three years under Operation ‘Deti I Qete” or Calm Sea, use of this route has increased dramatically. Last week, on a trip to Macedonia and Kosovo to examine this claim for myself, I was struck by the dramatic natural beauty of the journey.

The journey by bus, as many trafficked women reputedly travel, is particularly enchanting between Skopje, Macedonia and Pristina in Kosovo. The hillsides are green, covered with trees and whitewashed houses with red tile roofs. Behind these hills, there are small grey mountains, wreathed in mist. How ironic that the trip of trafficked women across these borders is so lovely, that the horror that awaits them is entirely belied by the beauty of this place. Even nature seemed to reinforce that, on the surface, all was well and pretty. If I were a trafficked woman on this journey, looking at these sleepy hamlets tucked into the green hillsides, would I know that I was destined for hell?

I recently spent 13 and a half hours on the bus from hell. I traveled to Skopje, Macedonia and Pristina, Kosova where I had several very productive meetings and learned a great deal. In my next blog, I’ll share some of that with you. I realized that my blogs have gotten quite serious lately, perhaps as a result of the subject matter I am focusing on this summer. So for the sake of my sanity and your enjoyment, I will regale you with the hilarious tale of my mosquito filled, 13.5-hour bus ride through Pristina and on to Kukes, then Durres, and finally, Tirana.

Originally, my colleague and I were scheduled to depart from Pristina on a bus that traveled through Skopje and then to Tirana that would take approximately 9 hours. We arrived at the bus station in Pristina at the appointed time. Unfortunately, my colleague discussed her lack of a visa for Macedonia (Albanian’s require a 10 Euro visa to pass through the country) to the hirsute, chain-smoking bus driver’s assistant who informed her that she would have to go to the embassy. This was followed by the bus driver, who looked like a low rent version of Don Johnson during the Miami Vice years, attempting to drive off with my luggage on the bus. I had to chase down the bus, screaming at the driver that my luggage was still inside the bus. He finally stopped and allowed me to take my luggage out of the bus. In fact, he even helped me to pick up my suitcase. Thanks, Don!

After a long argument involving various dramatic gesticulations and shouting, we were allowed to board a different bus that would take a longer route through northern Albania. It wasn’t actually all that generous given that our new route should have been three Euros cheaper than our original tickets. The very route that someone yesterday had warned me was “like torture” and that she would “prefer to walk.” I knew we were in for a special treat when the bus assistant informed us that the air conditioning wasn’t working. This would not have been so bad had any of the windows actually opened. Or if the teenaged girl in front of me had bothered to take a shower since, oh, say, January. Despite the lack of windows, mosquitoes had somehow managed to make the bus their home and were flying about everywhere.

To alleviate the crushing boredom and oppressive heat as we drove through Kosova, I occupied myself with looking at the hotel and restaurant names. There was a Restaurant Bill Klinton that was flying a huge American flag, a Rock Hard Café, and, my personal favorite, Hotel Estrada. I mean, did Erik even know that there was a CHIPS following in rural Kosova? When watching the scenery ceased to amuse me, I took to crushing mosquitoes against the window. It was then that I noticed a large brown smear on the window that I prayed was a previously squashed mosquito.

Long trips by bus involve many, many stops in this region. Even though we were stopped, a mother with three kids decided to smoke on the bus. Several loud coughs later, she seemed unfazed. It was only after my adopted Albanian grandma yelled at her to go outside that she left. My new granny, who could have easily landed a role in the remake of the Godfather with her dyed black hair, black dress, and black orthopedic shoes, and I had made friends after having a conversation which neither one of us understood because she spoke entirely in Albanian and I spoke entirely in English. I think we talked about feet, since she kept lifting her leg up and pointing to her foot, which was generally followed by laughter. Occasionally throughout the trip, she would glance across the aisle and smile at me as if to say, hey, no one else lets me talk about my gout.

After about seven hours, I finally started to drift off to sleep. At that very moment, we entered the northern “road” into Albania which seemed to have been composed almost entirely of boulders. Looking out of the window, the road (calling this path a road is incredibly generous) was full of hairpin turns and was barely wide enough for the bus to pass safely. On the other side of the road, there was no shoulder, just a long sheer drop down the side of the mountains which didn’t seem to phase any of the cars that came screaming around the road and passing with inches to spare in a typically Albanian fashion. Wow, thank goodness it was dark or this might actually have been scary.

I finally managed to fall asleep when my colleague woke me up at 6:30 AM to tell me, “I have some bad news.” Really? Just now? It turns out that the bus was full of Kosovars headed to the beach in Durres and we were stopping there before we went to Tirana. At that point, it couldn’t get any worse so I just shrugged and counted my mosquito bites. When we finally arrived in Tirana at 8:30 that morning, my favorite pants caught on the door of our busted taxi and ripped down the right side.

This was an important lesson in the way of life in the Balkans. Unexpected events and unscheduled detours such as this happen all the time here. Change is slow and, when it does come, is uneven and haphazard. I believe that gradual change will also happen with the fight against trafficking, beginning with better awareness raising and rehabilitation programs for victims. I’d like to close with the immortal words of those masters of class, AC/DC, “I’m on the highway to hell/And I’m going down, all the way down...”

Northern Albania is one of the most deprived regions of the country. Farming is difficult due to poor soil, education and government services are poor and patchy, and the area is infamous for the persistence of blood feuds. In northern Albania, you routinely see farmers with donkeys and carts taking watermelons to market, small vendors lining the streets selling roasted ears of corn, and villagers wearing traditional white and black dress. Parochial attitudes still predominate and arranged marriages are quite common, a project manager at an international development organization I spoke with estimated that, in the villages, up to 80% of the marriages were arranged, primarily to men that were living abroad (mostly illegally) for work.

During a conversation with a child protection specialist working for an international development agency in the north, we discussed the need to change attitudes regarding the raising of children and gender equality. He advocated eloquently for the increased rights of children and for an improvement in their treatment. When you ask a family in the north if they beat their children, they will say yes. When you ask them if they abuse their children, they will say of course not. Parents rarely consult children as to what their preferences are and he believed, rightly so, that all of this must change.

Later, the conversation turned to the topic of trafficking. This same man that had advocated for improved gender equity and treatment of children proceeded to tell me that he thought that trafficking was mostly the fault of the victims. I asked him why he thought this way. His response was that girls can not be forced to go somewhere that they do not want to go and the ones that want to go know what they will be doing, which is why some girls who are trafficked are not very attractive. I think I hid my shock at this moment by asking some other, unrelated questions about children. Even after discussing the high rates of arranged marriages, the low regard for the value of women, the archaic gender roles that place so high a burden on women, and the entrenched shame attached to victims of trafficking who return to the community, he thought trafficking was the fault of individual girls who “knew what they are getting into.”

Reflecting on what he said later that day, it depressed me to think that a university educated man who was working on child protection and gender equity still couldn’t see the connection between the phenomenon of trafficking and unequal gender roles and lack value for women. If we can’t get someone like that to take the next step, what chance do we have of changing behavior and attitudes with a villager that can not read or write? When we walked around the town that day, we asked several people on the street what they thought about trafficking and how they would treat a survivor. Various people that we spoke with, young and old, men and women, told us mostly the same things, to the effect of: trafficking was purely for profit, that it was the lowest thing a human being could do, and that not even animals should face such conditions. They would, of course, treat the girl with sympathy and respect but, sadly, society does not accept such people. I thought how interesting it was that everyone was so quick to show that they were compassionate and forgiving and that it was really other people that attached stigma to trafficking victims. Refusing to take responsibility for their own attitudes and passing the blame on to others are part of what make trafficking so difficult to fight here. If you won’t acknowledge that something is a problem in your own household or community, you can’t change or address it.

The following day, I visited a center for the protection and rehabilitation of trafficking survivors. We arrived during their daily group chat with social workers and a psychologist. The topic of the day was how to properly care for pets. Apparently, the discussion of the merits of dogs versus cats had been particularly heated. On the second floor, a painting by one of the girls caught my attention. While its execution was amateurish, the imagery was powerful. Against a black background, a torn heart contained the heavily made up face of a woman. Her eyes were shut and there were tears streaming down her face. Surrounding the heart was a chain, into which were linked a needle and a stack of cash. What a beautiful illustration of such a despicable crime against human dignity; all that was missing was a gun. Many traffickers are jacks-of-all-trades, trafficking guns, drugs, and/or women as and when the situation is most favorable for their respective “goods.”

I got a chance to speak with some of the girls and they told me about what they do during a normal day, chores, cleaning and a variety of vocational training. Two of the girls were on dinner duty that night and were charmingly attired in white aprons and little white hats. I asked what was for dinner and they told me it was pastiche (a sort of quiche made with pasta, cheese, and eggs and baked in the oven) and green salad. I jokingly told them that, in that case, I was staying! One of the girls gave a shy laugh and said okay. The other girl never looked up from the ground.

I wish the development specialist could have come with me to that shelter. I wish he could have seen how many of the girls were so shy and fearful that they could not look you in the eye. I wish he could have felt the palpable, but unspoken, sense of guilt and shame that hung over these girls, as if everything they suffered had been their own fault. I wish he could have seen how some of the girls tried to shrink into themselves as protection against the hurt inflicted by every person they encountered in their short lives. I wanted him to ask them if, at fourteen or even younger, they believed, when a practiced man (a trafficker) twice their age promised them love and a better life abroad or in the big city, that they were destined for a brothel. Then I would like to hear him tell me that these girls choose this life, that they know what they are getting into and that it’s their fault they are beaten, shamed, abused and have their dignity taken away from them while they are still children. I’d like to hear him explain why these women and girls then have to suffer the shame of being a victim of circumstance and stigma for the rest of their lives. The injustice of it all is staggering and I wish I could make him, and everyone like him, see it.

For the crime of being an Albanian, a seven-year-old girl can not get a visa to travel to Italy once a month for a blood transfusion that will keep her alive. This is the story of one of my work colleagues, Iris*. Her daughter, once a pretty, happy girl, is unrecognizably bloated from the heavy medications she must now take in order to live. If Iris had permission to travel to Italy, for two days once a month, Iris’s daughter would not have to take these disfiguring medications. Her parents live in Italy, in a city in the north, and doctors in a hospital there have agreed to treat the little girl, which they have certified in writing. Not good enough, the Italian embassy says. Hospitals in Albania do not have the equipment or the expertise to treat the little girl and, thus, Iris wants to bring her to Italy for treatment. She has no intention on settling there because, as she told me, her family, another daughter and her husband, are here in Albania.

Forget trying to get treatment in Greece; for an Albanian to get a visa to travel to Greece is a long, expensive, and sometimes fruitless, process. The expense and difficulty of travel for Albanians bound for certain countries was brought home to me the other day when, while visiting a prison, a pastor warned me to keep my eyes on my passport. It could be worth upwards of $28,000 to the right person because a forged US passport would allow an Albanian to travel without a visa to Greece, Italy, and into the EU.

Why is it so difficult for Iris to get to Italy for her daughter’s treatment? The Italian embassy in Albania rarely offers visas to children for fear of facilitating trafficking in children. New attention has been focused on the practice of child trafficking, partially at the impetus of the Albanian government. The Albanian government recently signed an agreement with Greece that, while still awaiting ratification in the Greek government, attempts to decrease the incidence of children trafficked from Albania for begging or labor exploitation. The new agreement would identify and protect Albanian children who were trafficked to Greece in collaboration with the Albanian government until these children are 18 years old. Children should be repatriated only if they desire to return to Albania (which, government officials assume, they probably will not) so a lot of the financial burden is put on Greece under this agreement. This may explain why Greece has been slow to ratify the agreement. The Albanian government is also looking into agreements on child trafficking collaboration with other surrounding countries, including Italy. It is not hard to see these children in Albania as well, they are everywhere, begging for money or attempting to sell you some cigarettes.

It goes without saying that addressing the issue of child trafficking is an imperative. These children should be in school, not exploited on the streets, begging for change and being abused by passers by. However, when officials stick to the letter of policy, when they don’t investigate individual cases properly, when they deny permission to travel to a sick little girl, they harm the very children that they are attempting to protect. Finding a way forward that protects children without impinging on their human rights, particularly when their lives are at stake, is critical. Policy should not be wrapped up in a stereotyped image of the Albanian as trafficker, the Albanian as mafioso. In the words of Yeats, "But O, sick children of the world,/ Of all the many changing things/ In dreary dancing past us whirled...Words alone are certain good." Words alone will not save Iris's daughter.

What are Iris’s options now? She can only wait and hope that the Italian embassy will issue a visa that will save her daughter’s life. As Iris put it, “What can I do now? Nothing. The Italian embassy couldn’t care less. This is what it is to be Albanian in this world.”

*Name has been changed to protect identity

Here’s something I never thought I would say. I have been to a women’s prison in Albania. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t there for crimes against the state. I was accompanying a local organization that ministers to the social and religious needs of the prisoners. On first impression, the prison is more like summer camp. Women sleep eight to a room on four sets of bunk beds in small housing structures. The women are allowed to wear their own clothes (not because the state believes in freedom of expression, but because they can’t afford to issue them prison uniforms), they have televisions and food in their houses, they wash their own laundry, and they can basically move about freely within the compound. I have been in prisons in the UK and the US and there is something that is so crushing to the human spirit to be locked inside of a room and you don’t need to spend a long time inside of a prison to feel the walls closing in on you. At least these women have freedom of movement within the compound. Classes are offered to enhance the women’s skills, such as hairdressing and language instruction, in Italian and English, as well as sewing.

Women were eager to ask me questions and many also joked that they wanted me to ask George Bush (or “Bushie” as they called him), who recently visited Albania, to free them. One particularly animated woman, with a grill even Nelly would envy, blew Bushie a kiss and wanted to find out if he was available, especially if he liked older women. What was surprising to me was the amount of women who were older and still incarcerated. The majority of women were incarcerated for killing their husbands. In the Albanian system, women have little recourse if their husband beats them. They can go to the police but, as a colleague told me, the police can’t hold them long and, when they are released, it only serves to make them angrier. She went on to tell me that many men here believe it is their right, even their duty, to beat their wives to keep them “in line.” After years of abuse and injustice from the system, some of these women snap and kill their husbands. Most of the prisoners were shocked to learn my age, most guessed that I was 20 or less. In another time and place, a woman that could have been my grandmother told me that suffering has made them old and ugly.

While I was in the prison, I met a woman who, in her late twenties, had seen a life time of tragedy. Beth* was the middle child of three sisters. Her eldest sister, Sara, married an alcoholic man who beat her and also raped Beth and her little sister. To escape from this man, Beth married an Albanian and they moved to Greece together. While in Greece, she had a son. Concerned about Sara’s deteriorating health and ongoing abuse, she decided to visit Sara with her family. Sara’s husband managed to rape Beth again while she was visiting so she shot and killed him. Tragically, Sara’s daughter was also killed by a stray bullet while she was outside playing with Beth’s son. Beth was incarcerated and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Her husband then divorced her. When she was a few years into her sentence, her son contracted an incurable illness and later died. Despite all of this misery and heartache, Beth was friendly and relaxed, making jokes and carrying her head high. But Beth didn’t see in herself the incredibly strong-willed and capable survivor that I saw in her. She had learned to be a seamstress while in the prison and I asked her what she thought her future was once she got out of prison. She seemed almost puzzled by the question, as if no one had ever though to ask before. After a moment she replied, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a future.”

So why bother to relate this story when I am supposed to be here working on anti-trafficking? Because these same conditions of gender inequality and mistreatment of women increase the vulnerability of girls and women to trafficking. Albania has made some progress in prosecuting and incarcerating pimps and traffickers, but not the women they have forced into prostitution. A colleague of mine recently related to me that they had not seen a new arrest for prostitution in the prison for three months. However, unless we can put into practice social change that will help prevent the trafficking cycle from starting, prosecution alone will not end trafficking.

Traffickers are crafty and adaptable. As Michelle Lanspa, an AP Peace Fellow with TAMPEP, noted in her recent blog about trafficking in Italy, traffickers in Albania have also gotten wiser about using women. Whereas women used to get nothing but abuse and beatings, traffickers that exploit women for sex work now give them some money, perhaps buy them some designer clothes. In some cases, women are allowed to send money home to their families, which is so dangerous because, even though they still don’t want to engage in sex work, they are reassured by the knowledge that they are at least supporting their family. These women should not believe that their only value is as cash cows for their family while their traffickers continue to sell their health and self worth to the highest bidder. Until we can rectify serious gender inequality and the abuse of girls and women, trafficking will persist.

*Name has been changed to protect identity

In the last few days, temperatures have reached into the 40s. That`s hot, really hot. When it`s hot and sticky out, what do most Albanians do? Wait in endless cues to pay their bills in cash (forget credit cards, nowhere but the highest end hotels in Tirana will accept them), each bill requiring appearing personally before the respective agency or company for whose service they are paying. Then they drink coffee. Lots of coffee. With lots and lots of sugar. Saying that Albanians have a sweet tooth is the mother of all understatements.

Unlike in the United States where you can pay your bills with money that you don`t have without ever venturing out of your house, you must pay your bills in hard currency in Albania. You had also better get up early; many government offices and other companies are open at 8 AM and closed by 130 PM. Some offices reopen from 6-8 PM but, frequently, this reopening happens only on paper or in theory.

Recently, my Albanian colleagues have been helping me to get clearance to visit a major women`s prison in Albania, where, among women arrested for prostitution, there are some trafficking victims. Last month, this process required submitting a passport number to the appropriate government agency and arriving at the door of the prison with one`s passport. We submitted this information before I had even left the United States in May. But the regulations changed again. Now I was required to submit a copy of my passport. Done. Wait, now you are required to submit the offer letter from Advocacy Project so they know what you are doing in Albania. Done. Yesterday, I learned that we must submit a copy of my CV. We are still waiting to find out if I have finally satisfied the requirements.

Things take time in Albania. Rules seem to change overnight for no particular reason. How can anyone keep up with what the new system or the new regulations are? More importantly, how will the new National Referral System for Victims of Trafficking ever be effectively implemented? As much as we may all want change to happen quickly, we must realize that it takes time. We have to be realistic about what the government here can provide and accomplish. This is a poor state and, without outside help, it`s ability to achieve it`s goals is limited.

Who suffers in all of this? The victims of trafficking. They are the ones who do not receive the services they so desperately need. Many trafficked women in Albania, due to poverty and desperation, are actually forced to seek out their traffickers and be retrafficked in order to survive. They don`t do this blindly or out of ignorance, they take a calculated risk. Don`t make the mistake of thinking that trafficking is a problem that happens out there, in Albania, in some other country and it doesn`t happen here (the US, UK, wherever).

During a meeting I had this Wednesday at a prominent charity that operates throughout the world and has an active branch in Tirana, the woman I was interviewing with told me, "the whole world is implicated in trafficking." There isn`t a country that isn`t touched by the phenomenon, whether it is a country of origin, transit or destination. These women and girls are going somewhere, they are forced into prostitution to satisfy a demand. We have to acknowledge that sex trafficking is a global phenomenon, not an "Albanian problem" and we must work internationally and interorganizationally to end it.

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The Tool Shop in Tirana

For more images of Tirana, visit my Flickr account.

"Welcome to the land of eagles!" my colleague exclaimed as we descended into the Albanian national airport. "Although I have never seen an eagle in my lifetime, that is beside the point." Many things in Albania seem to be beside the point, driving laws, pedestrian walkways, and having the correct change for your visa. According to all the information I had read prior to going to Albania, $10 was sufficient payment for a visa that entitled me to stay in Albania for 30 days, when I would have to apply at the police department for a renewal. Unfortunately, the woman behind the counter seemed perfectly up-to-date on the fact that the US dollar is weaker than a three-day-old baby, though not on the fact that giant hair and orange eye shadow are a bit 1980s. I had only $12 in my wallet and, having spent the last three weeks in the UK, didn't want to part with 10 pounds. "You have only $12? Ok, no problem," and, with that, I had arrived in Albania. The people here are quite nice, even if you have less Albanian than a two-year-old, and they are generally quite willing to flout regulations.

We were met at the airport by one of the women I will be working with this summer, who promptly proceeded to drive on the wrong side of the road in the direct path of a large, oncoming bus. Welcome to Albania, where driving laws are really more like guidelines, as opposed to enforceable rules. As we drove into the city on the new highway that was opened in March, though it looked already to be about five years old, garishly painted buildings in shades ranging from florescent lime green to a bright salmon pink rose on all sides. It was quite hot, about 37 degrees Celsius, even at 10 PM. The streets were full of young, and older, people out enjoying coffees or just walking around. Once I got to see my bedroom, where I would finally be able to unpack my things for a few months, I got a lesson in how to work the "air cooler" which was the size of a large dorm refrigerator and cooled the air perhaps three degrees. The instructions did, however, inform me that it was also an air purifier and would prevent me from getting "dust worm."

Later that evening, my new roommate took me on a walk around the city, pointing out some major attractions, including the numerous banners around Tirana welcoming the arrival of President Bush. When Bush's tour was under way, a headline in The Guardian announced, "Bush to Visit Friendly European Countries" which, to my mind, would be a very short tour. Many Albanians had come from all around the country to see him during his brief visit. According to my friend, all the streets were blocked so that only the president's motorcade could use the highway and everyone was ushered inside until 10 minutes before the president’s arrival. People that had traveled for perhaps days then had to rush hell for leather to get a glimpse of him but some were simply too far away. How sad that the Albanians didn't have the distinct pleasure of holding on to him longer.

The fact is, we have a lot to learn from our European friends in their attempt to criminalize the demand for prostitution, the key factor that drives the trafficking for sexual exploitation market. Sweden is a particularly laudable example. Italy also has legislation that provides victims of trafficking a route to gaining citizenship. These two factors are both missing in the United Kingdom. The recent TIP Report by the US government makes two recommendations for the United Kingdom: increase bed space for trafficking victims and give them a route to citizenship. I was never sure while in the US how accurate these reports were but, after spending time in the UK and meeting with many people whose remit was exactly these matters, I have found it to be spot on. Albanian colleagues also claim that the TIP report is quite accurate for Albania as well.

In some ways, it is hard for me to acknowledge that the streets full of imported Italian fashions (at ridiculously high prices, I might add), well dressed young people, new Mercedes, and Gucci knockoffs, are also home to traffickers and their victims. I start to wonder if the young guys driving that new Mercedes are buying and selling women as if they are handbags. In an economy with a nearly 30% unemployment rate, where is this money coming from? One step forward that is glaringly lacking in the TIP report is acknowledging the corruption in the countries on the receiving end of human trafficking. While Albanians clearly don't mind flouting regulations here and there, the same practice goes on in rich countries, though perhaps not as visibly. In countries with high, though of course not infallible, security measures, there is someone on the inside who is receiving bribes and other perks to let these people into the country. Until we start to acknowledge and address the corruption at home, how can we ask those in poorer countries to do so?

Sally looks at her feet and continuously plays with a plastic bag in her lap. She has a shock of hair that stands straight up and a green dress with little flowers printed on it. In fact, she looks much like any other teenage girl you might see walking down the street. But Sally has a different story: she was trafficked into the United Kingdom a year ago to work as a prostitute, a “career” she has had most of her young life.

Born in West Africa, her mother died when Sally was just a few months old. She went to live with an aunt, who may or may not be a blood relation at all, Sally doesn’t know. When she was only five, a man came up to her at the market and took her by the hand and promised her a better life. That better life turned out to be child prostitution in East Africa. From that time on, she was raped by several clients each day. When she got to be “too old” for the taste of the men her trafficker brought her, Sally was sold to another man and trafficked into the United Kingdom, again forced into prostitution. Several months ago, Sally ran away and was identified by the police as a trafficking victim and brought to the safe house where she currently lives.

Once Sally had left the room, the director asked us how old we thought Sally was. I guessed 16 or 17. The director of the safe house has told us that women must be 18 years old to be accepted to this CHASTE coordinated safe house but, as a youth worker for most of her career, believes Sally to be no older than 17. She had a false passport, arranged by her trafficker, that claimed her age as 23, a falsehood so clear that it is amazing she was able to enter the country.

Apparently, today was one of Sally’s good days, no fits, no tantrums, no screaming for hours on end. Despite not ever being taught to read and write, on her good days she can reason about her outbursts, understanding that she was taking her anguish out on others. If anyone has a reason to scream, Sally does. Here was the moment that I had been anticipating and dreading at the same time. I was finally speaking with someone that had gone through such a horrendous ordeal and I didn’t know if I would be able to hold it together. What got me through the meeting was listening to her complain about her 10 PM curfew – she had the same concerns as any normal teenager. She wanted to go out, to have fun, to be with friends. Something she had been denied her entire life.

There are some wounds that I wonder if any amount of time will ever heal. How can a person recover from such a trauma? When Sally should have been playing with dolls, she was being raped by grown men. Where she should have had a mother to love and nourish her, she had a trafficker who used and exploited her for money. Her search for a mother continues today – she calls the director of the safe house Mum even though she has been told not to because the safe house should give Sally the skills to eventually live on her own, not create dependency.

I have changed Sally’s name from the one given to her at the safe house to protect her identity. No one knows what Sally’s real name is, not even Sally. How basic to human dignity to be afforded a name, how cruel that Sally never received this small confirmation that she mattered. What is even sadder to realize is that in the United Kingdom alone, there are an estimated 4,000-10,000 women and children with their own stories who are trafficked into the country for sexual exploitation each year. All of these girls had families at one point in time, all of them had dreams. In my time in the UK so far, I am increasingly reminded of a poem by the great Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?...Does it stink like rotten meat?...Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?” What happens to ten thousand unanswered dreams?

Friday found me in Huntingdon, a town that is probably the stereotypical image many Americans have of quaint British hamlets, which is famous for being the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) and not much since. Jane, the legal manager of CHASTE, and I were on our way to the Women's Housing Forum in London to hear a discussion of what reproductive health services NGOs are providing to at-risk youth.

As we walked around this picturesque town, and I was taking pictures of a medieval church that was so beautiful it almost looked fake, I realized that the UK and the US have a lot to learn from each other in terms of their ability to address human trafficking. It is such a complex issue that needs to be met and combated at various levels, including from a legal, public health, service, support, immigration, mental health and demand perspective. International collaboration will be critical in ending the modern slave trade, a practice that is so medieval in description, it it difficult to believe it is a reality. This may have been the result of deep reflection or the fact that, on the pub across the street, that painting of King George III, ironically, looked exactly like George Washington.

On Wednesday, I had paid a visit to the Royal Mews, the working stables of the royal family. The amount of effort expended to keep the royal stable running smoothly was staggering. In addition to the Rolls Royce Phantom were a number of carriages and coaches, including the four-ton, aptly named Gold State coach, which had so much gilding and decoration it made Donald Trump's decorating style seem minimalist in comparison.

Visits to other tourist destinations had me thinking about long standing connections between the US and UK and how we can begin to build international collaboration to address human trafficking. Trafficking is a phenomenon that frequently requires the crossing of borders and, unless we begin to create joint strategies in countries of origin and destination, will be very difficult to address from an isolationist perspective.

Later on Friday afternoon, we heard a presentation from the Chief Executive of Brook London which operates a number of reproductive health clinics for at-risk youth throughout greater London. It was fascinating to hear about how they were attempting to address Britain's teen pregnancy problem, the highest in Europe. The United States has the sad honor of having the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world.

Brook London's CE mentioned that they did provide services to what she termed "unaccompanied minors," some of whom were pregnant or had STIs (sexually transmitted infections). Some of their patients are almost certainly trafficked girls and women and this presentation reinforced the connections between human trafficking and public health. It is questionable whether their outreach coordinators, who are undeniably doing fantastic work, would be able to recognize a trafficked person without specialized training. Trafficking victims don't wear labels and, for reasons of shame and fears of retribution against themselves or their families, their stories don't come out easily. Could I recognize a trafficking victim? Could you?

Having just arrived in the UK on Tuesday, going to meetings on Wednesday with Home Office officials seemed a bit daunting. Carrie Pemberton, the CEO of CHASTE, tends to keep a schedule that would tire an Olympic athlete. Despite jet lag and a looming cold, I was eager to learn more about what the United Kingdom is doing to address human trafficking. So I drank some strong coffee and headed off to London with Carrie to absorb some new information.

Carrie was interviewed by an official from the Home Office to discuss the successes and failures of Operation Pentameter. Pentameter took place in the United Kingdom in February 2006 and was the largest coordinated, inter-agency effort to crack down on trafficking on a national scale. During this operation, 232 people were arrested and 134 charges were brought against suspected traffickers. 84 poetential trafficking victims were identified. Despite preconceived notions, more than Eastern European women were discovered, including African, South East Asian, and Brazilian women.

As an outsider, what is truly striking is the victim focused approach and the clear commitment from the government that trafficking requires urgent attention. However, there is clearly a gap between government commitment and funding. The UK lacks spare capacity and bed space in safe houses for trafficking victims, as well as a route to citizenship for these vulnerable women. 1/3 of safe house capacity in the UK is funded by the churches and coordinated by CHASTE; which is quite shocking when you realize how tiny CHASTE is and that its budget is probably a rounding error for the Home Office's balance sheets. Given the importance of CHASTE in the provision of safe housing and trafficking victim assistance overall, the government really ought to be coughing up the funds for CHASTE. At the end of the interview, the inability of government to bridge the funding gap was ironically illustrated by a particular government official's complete bewilderment at our request for reimbursement of our travel expenses from Cambridge to London.

My initial impressions are of a very dedicated and effective organization (CHASTE), headed by a very dynamic and committed woman who is making a real difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable women in Great Britain. The government, despite its mistakes, is taking some intial steps to address the trafficking issue, releasing the "UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking" in March of 2007 and gearing up for Operation Pentameter II next year. Clearly, there is so much more to be done. My preliminary assumption about the crucial role of funding was confirmed later that night by Carrie. When I asked her what her largest organizational challenge was, she replied without hesitation: funding. Everything else can be improved but it all flows from funding.

In less than two weeks, I fly to London to begin my fellowship with CHASTE, a non-profit organization which actively works for the global eradication of trafficking for sexual exploitation. CHASTE recently opened a new office in Tirana, Albania where most of my summer fellowship will take place. Despite all of the preparation, both through my research at ISIM (Institute for the Study of International Migration) and extensive reading on trafficking and Albania, it’s hard to feel entirely prepared for a new culture and confronting such an enormous, nebulous problem face-to-face.

Reactions to my impending fellowship have ranged from “Albania, that’s like a third world country!” to “Trafficking? Is that about urban congestion?” Albania is a major destination and transit country for trafficking victims, as well as having an internal trafficking problem. The average age of many girls forced into prostitution is 13 or 14 and most experienced sexual abuse prior to their trafficking, according to CHASTE research.

I am not entirely sure of what I will encounter this summer. I know that it will be difficult, perhaps at times grim, work but so critical to developing better systems for rescuing and supporting trafficking survivors. I work at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) at Georgetown University on a project that examines the reintegration trajectories and experience of minors that were trafficked into the United States. I have read the most harrowing stories of beatings, life under conditions of slavery, rape, and mental trauma but I have not worked directly with survivors of trafficking and am trying to free myself of preconceived notions of how they will behave or how to act around them.

My first two weeks will be spent learning about CHASTE and their work and then going to Birmingham where I will meet with the Albania team that I will work with this summer. My schedule includes visiting a safe house, learning about how the London (Metropolitan) police identify and refer trafficking victims, as well visiting the Poppy Project, an organization that works to establish safe houses for victims of trafficking.

After that, I travel to Tirana to begin working in CHASTE’s new office. While I am there, I’ll help CHASTE to conduct outreach for and support trafficking survivors in Albania. One of my main goals this summer is to be able to compare the US and European systems for identifying and supporting trafficking survivors so that we can adopt the best practices of both systems and foster international collaboration to combat trafficking for sexual exploitation. I can not begin to imagine the strength and courage of the women and children that survive trafficking for sexual exploitation but I hope that this summer brings me one step closer to understanding how we can enhance systems to identify, rescue, and support trafficking survivors.