Rescuing Ghana's Enslaved Children

Looking for a ray of hope today, and found one in the story of Mark, a six-year old West African boy who finds himself freed from the chains of slavery, and the brutal half-life of servitude in a Ghana fishing village on the shores of Lake Volta.

Back in October 2006, the New York Times ran a news item on the diabolical relationship between poverty and slavery in modern-day Africa, how desperately hungry parents sell their own children into cruel bonded labor in order to lessen the burden on the rest of the family. A six-year old boy named Mark put a human face on the practice; he carried such a haunted look that one of the reporters said she was struck by how he never smiled.

And no wonder; these boys' young lives, dodging alligators, eels and entangled fishing nets, are the stuff of nightmares:

A dozen boys, interviewed in their canoes or as they sewed up ratty nets ashore, spoke of backbreaking toil, 100-hour workweeks and frequent beatings. They bore a pervasive fear of diving into the lake’s murky waters to free a tangled net, and never resurfacing.
One 10-year-old said he was sometimes so exhausted that he fell asleep as he paddled. Asked when he rested, another boy paused from his net mending, seemingly confused. “This is what you see now,” he said.
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The children’s sole comfort seems to be the shared nature of their misery, a camaraderie of lost boys who have not seen their families in years, have no say in their fate and, in some cases, were lured by false promises of schooling or a quick homecoming.

One person who read the NY Times article that day was Pam Cope, a mother who had channeled her grief over the loss of her 15-year old son towards financing orphanages and family health shelters in Vietnam and Cambodia, through their Touch A Life Foundation . Her and her husband Randy immediately took the initiative to contact the Times reporter on the story, and through her reached some people in Ghana who were in a position to make a difference. The Copes family, assisted by family and friends, raised enough money to free Mark and six other children from their hopeless lives of misery, giving them hope for a better future right in time for Christmas.

Working with a small Ghanaian charity, Mrs. Cope paid $3,600 to free the children and found them a new home in an orphanage near Accra, the capital.
After years of privation, the children were dumbstruck by the plentiful breakfast served at the orphanage, caregivers there said.
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Few of the children had had any schooling. All now attend school.
When Mrs. Cope visited in January, she found Mark Kwadwo a transformed child — reveling in piggyback rides, spaghetti and his new school uniform.
“To hear him giggle,” she wrote by e-mail, “was priceless.”

"Jantsen's Gift: A True Story of Grief, Rescue and Grace", the book that Pam Cope wrote to bring her organization's hopeful story to the attention of others, was in the news again recently when it touched the lives of a vacationing St-Louis couple who also were prompted into immediate action:

“Jason began reading it, and every couple of pages he was saying, ‘Oh, my God, Jen, listen to this!’ He read it in 24 hours,” Jennifer said. “I read it within the next 24 hours.”
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“After we read the book, it wasn’t ‘should we go to Ghana?’ It was ‘when are we going to Ghana?’” Jennifer said.
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In August the Hackmanns boarded a plane in New York and flew to Accra, the capital of Ghana, with 37 other Touch A Life volunteers, who paid their own way....

Touch A Life works with George Achibra, a Ghanaian who has worked since 2000 to free children there. Volunteers work at freeing the children, yet they offer the masters no money.
Paying for the release of children likely would provide more incentive to continue the practice and make slavery there more lucrative.
“When you are negotiating the release of one of the children, you are doing it by making them feel bad,” Jennifer said. “You guilt them into it.”
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So far, 69 children have been rescued, Newton said. Those include three children, ages 9 to 11, that Jason and the others helped free on their trip.
“One of the kids had been a slave since he was four years old,” Jason said. “I thought that kid would never smile again. He had the look of hopelessness. Two days after we rescued him, he had a smile on his face and he is happy.”
The children are not reunited with their parents, for fear they would be sold again, but live and are educated at two village camps, depending on their age.
Jennifer is back in Ghana this week and called Jason at his office Nov. 17. While they were on the phone, Teeteh, one of the boys Jason helped rescue, came up to her and asked, “Is that my father who rescued me?”
Touch A Life, which has an annual operating budget approaching $400,000, works not only to rescue children but also to make them self sufficient through strategies such as micro-financing, providing them with small loans to start businesses. “We work with Ghanaians in the country who know what they need,” Newton said. The foundation has been funded solely through donations, though it is preparing to apply for its first government grant, Newton said.
Another effort is to convert the fishermen to what is called sustainable aqua-culture, basically fish farms, using cages and ponds. “You get a better product, and you don’t have to use child labor,” Newton said.
As for the Hackmanns, they said they have made a commitment to see this through.
“People think, ‘Africa? It’s hopeless.’” Jason said.

“But this is 7,000 kids, not 7 million. This can be done.”