Mozzeenet

I’ve been floored by a hideous flu since Saturday. Had to take the whole week off work. It was horrendous. Started with a terrible headache on Saturday and then morphed into sore throat, aches, fever, a hacking cough and constricted chest. I have had a temperature constantly from Saturday to yesterday which made me feel awful.

Only today have I felt marginally better but have still been in bed. It really makes you appreciate good health. I don’t know how I’d cope if I had an ongoing illness. You feel so isolated and weak. Everything tastes horrible - have only been eating dry biscuits and a bit of fruit. Breathing has been difficult too.

I’m hoping by Monday, I’ll be able to go back to work after another quiet weekend. Might try to get in the Picasso exhibition if I’m feeling better.

Last weekend, I saw Pirates of the Caribbean II with Andrew which was really good. We had won tickets to the Gold Class cinema which was a real treat - reclining, plush seats and a button to call for service.

Also had a good night meeting up with Nick who was down from Sydney and his friend Sarah who lives here as well as Kate, Andrew’s sister last Sat night but I was already feeling sick by then so didn’t enjoy it as much as I normally would.

It’s awful that people trafficking has become such a big trade all over the world. Vulnerable people are lured with promises of work and a better life. When you’re very poor it must be easy to fall into such traps. Wealthy, educated, self-sufficient people like us find it hard to understand how people can be duped into this type of thing.

Someone I spoke to recently had the view that these people have a choice so we shouldn’t feel any sympathy towards them. We’re so used to having choice in our society that we can’t understand when people don’t. We can’t understand how easy it is to be deceived especially if we’re a young teenage girl with very little experience in the world.

I attended a talk this week on ‘Child Trafficking in South Asia’, hosted by a non-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Friends of Kolkata. This organisation raises money to support NGOs in India. Representatives from one of these, the Centre for Communication and Development (CCD), based in Calcutta, which provide services to people who have been trafficked, spoke on the night. The speakers gave examples of young girls trafficked for prostitution, young boys as camel jockeys in the Middle East and disabled children for begging. One girl they spoke about from a very poor family had been tricked by a neighbour to go with a man who promised to marry her but then raped her and sold her for $AUD 700 to a brothel in Bombay. After that she was sold to brothels in Goa and other cities in India and contracted HIV. Finally she was rescued by CCD after a lot of hard work to find her and get her out.

This happens in many places including Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. It also happens here with the recent case of a woman being sentenced to gaol because she had held sex slaves, women who had been trafficked from Thailand, in Fitzroy Melbourne. The positive part of this is that our laws actually enabled her imprisonment to occur.

It’s shocking that people are treated as a commodity in this way. Of course slavery has been around forever. It’s not a new thing but in the world we live in today, it sickens me that there are so many out there willing to take advantage in such a terrible way of others who can’t defend themselves. I know it is a cycle and that those lower in the chain probably have very little as well but at the top, there are people who are raking in money from this, and that’s a travesty.