The Hopkins InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (HCF) and Students Educating and Empowering for Diversity (SEED) are currently hosting an anti-human trafficking awareness week that began on Monday. The series of events, entitled “My Generation Will Be Free,” is occurring in conjunction with the events of 14 other colleges in Maryland and is the first of its kind at Hopkins.
The week began on Monday with the distribution of temporary tattoos, which were designed to depict a barcode, on the Breezeway and Levering Courtyard. A 24-hour prayer session followed, starting Monday evening and finishing on Tuesday. The organizations also hosted speaker events throughout the week.
There is a Fair Trade Coffeehouse on Thursday at 8 p.m. in McCoy Hall’s Multipurpose Room, where students can perform poetry or music while enjoying fair trade coffee and tea.
The week commenced by turning heads on the Breezeway as Natalie Tibbels, another HCF staff member, sat against a lamppost at the bottom of the Breezeway, draped in chains with tape across her mouth. She sat in between the tables giving out the barcode tattoos on the Breezeway and in Levering Courtyard. Tibbels symbolized the enslaved population to shed light on their crisis.
Tibbels also explained how he believes that the students at Hopkins have an extremely powerful role in shaping the future of human rights. He thinks that student will go on to play integral role in government, society and policy.
“College students, and especially Hopkins students, are the next generation of leaders,” Justin Tibbels, HCF staff member who graduated from Hopkins in 2010, wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “They are the people who will go all over the world to take up positions of leadership in shaping future legislation, health care, research and community development. They are the people who will make and steward money. So it is important that these future leaders are aware of, conversant in, and passionate about people being enslaved around the world. It is our hope that Hopkins students will use their power and influence to change the world for the better, so that our generation will be a free generation. This begins with making small choices now to fight human trafficking in our everyday lives and right here in our city.”
That evening, HCF and SEED hosted “Perspectives on Human Trafficking”, a forum in Mudd Hall in which students could hear personal accounts of the formerly enslaved.
“The most powerful part of this entire week for me will probably be Margaret, a survivor of labor trafficking,” Tibbels wrote. “She shared her story with us during the panel presentation on Monday. At first I had literally thought she was a Hopkins student. She looked like anyone else in the crowd - a 24-year-old Ghanaian woman wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But I was nearly in tears as she told of being trafficked from Ghana to America, being bought for $4,000 in the airport, and being forced to be a house slave for three years before escaping.”
“Human trafficking is real, it’s all over the world, it’s right here in the United States, and it’s people just like you and me,” Tibbels concluded.
Starting Monday evening, the student groups hosted a 24-hour prayer in the Interfaith Center Library. Students took prayer shifts, taking turns praying for their cause. About 30 people attended this event, which continued into Tuesday evening.
“We believe that God is deeply sad and angry about human trafficking, and that he answers our prayers, so we ran a 24-hour creative prayer room in the Interfaith Center Library to pray for the freedom of the captives, justice to the evildoers, and compassion and action from lawmakers, law enforcement, and Hopkins students,” Tibbels wrote.
Religion and spirituality have provided the tenor for many of the week’s events. On Wednesday night, Christa Hayden of the International Justice Mission, a human rights agency that works with the community to rescue victims of slavery, addressed another audience in Mudd Hall for the event “God and Human Trafficking,” a discussion that placed human trafficking in a religious context.
For Tibbels and other active forces behind the week’s events, their efforts have proved satisfying.
“We’ve been very happy with how this awareness week has gone so far,” Tibbels wrote. “We have a week of high-quality events and the word is getting out there slowly but surely. We plan on making this an annual cause and hope that it becomes part of the culture of the Hopkins campus to care about this issue. This is the first year we’ve done something like this on this scale, and it’s been a great foundation so far for years to come.”
Other events that remain for the week are “Sex+Money Documentary”, a viewing of a Human Trafficking Documentary, with a discussion afterwards. This occurs on Friday, Apr. 20 at 8 p.m. in Mudd 26.
The Experiential Trafficking Tent will be available during Spring Fair’s operating hours.
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