Free the slaves

Slaves working in a mine

On a recent trip to Spain I downloaded some videos to watch on my journey. As I browsed through the usual iplayer and itunes nonsense I thought I’d try TED. For those of you that don’t know TED, it is a website, app, conference that is devoted to ideas worth spreading. Their mission is to spread ideas that will change attitudes, lives and ultimately the world. TED challenges the world most fascinating thinkers and doers to give the talk of their life in 18 minutes or less. On the TED ipad app there is a feature called ‘Inspire me’ and I happened to click on the video entitled LisaKristine: Photos that bear witness to modern slavery. 

Lisa is an already well-established photographer, writer and documentary maker documented modern day slavery. She works with, Free the slaves an NGO dedicated to the abolishing of slavery. She touches on some jaw-dropping facts, such as there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, which is double the amount taken during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The average cost of a slave during the slave trade was about three times that of the average American worker $50,000 in today’s money. However, today an entire generation of a family can be enslaved for a debt of as little of $18. 

Such stats are a sobering reality to those of us that thought much of physical slavery had been resigned to the history books. Free the slaves works with slaves to break them out of their vicious cycle and gives them the tools to survive once they are free. I highly recommend you watch the video if you have a spare 18 minutes. The video doesn’t make easy viewing, but is well-worth educating yourself on how our fellow human beings are being treated. If you’d like to support the abolishment of slavery, Free the salves.