| Location: | Penzance |
| Story Number: | Story-025 |
| Themes: | LGBTQ, Modern Slavery, networks, Quakers |
| Listen: | |
| Transcript: | Transcript by Jayde Stevenson I was given early retirement because I had been unwell, umm, and I wasn’t able to work any longer, but… I still felt I had a… you know, I have a… my brain is fine and I… I can do some physical things, so I felt – I had a real sense I had been given a gift of time. I’m not so elderly that, umm… I’m passing the baton onto somebody else… and then I became more involved in volunteering, um… I did things like… raising awareness of homophobia, um, I did things to support the ARDHO campaign. Oh yes ah yes, and the thing, the time I can remember getting very very fired up with anger is I went to an AGM, and um, there was a speaker there from Croydon community against trafficking and… I knew… I knew that there were modern day slaves, I knew that trafficking happened, but the picture this person painted was of people- not just women being brought into the sex industry, but men as well being brought in to work in car washes, work on the building sites illegally and this was happening in my neighbourhood. And I can remember this red-hot anger, I was so angry that this is happening- this is happening in my neighbourhood, and people like me didn’t know about it. Uh, we were happy to go to the car wash because it was cheap, it was such a bargain- things like that. So… um what happens with me is when I get angry, I think ‘well what can I do with that -what can I do? It’s no good just shouting about it’. Umm… and I was talking to a friend of mine who happened to be in the salvation army, and… she told me about that the salvation army have the contract from the Ministry of Justice to help people who’ve either escaped or been rescued from slavery and they take them to safe houses where they’re looked after for a while. Umm… and this scheme needed drivers, so I thought ‘ah that’s what I can do!’ (laughs) ‘Cos I can drive, I have a car!’, umm… so I… I went on a contact list and what would happen is I would get a text in the morning from the organiser who would say ‘are you available? We have someone who needs picking up in Whitechapel’. And for… selfishly I found it really rewarding, I felt I was really doing something to help those individuals, but it also meant that I felt I was doing something very practical to… to try and break down that horrific system where human beings are treated as being less than you or I. Umm, and the spin off from that was that other people… I’m a quaker, and people in my quaker meeting actually also started doing it. Notes ARDHO- Afghanistan Research Development and Health organization They are a non-governmental, non-profit and humanitarian organization registered with the Ministry of Economy of Afghanistan, established in 2019 by a group of young, energetic, motivated, and highly committed youth to address the most urgent and pressing needs of the people of Afghanistan to improve and develop the socio-economic status of the underprivileged and disadvantaged rural communities in Afghanistan. https://www.ardho.org/approach Link to the Salvation Army website on modern slavery: |