Making progress towards our total
The first thing to say is THANK YOU! Thank you to everyone who has donated and taken us to £2,819, nearly 60% of our total. If you have already donated please do share the link www.sendthemhome.co.uk on social as we still need more money.
Amy is now finally settled in her village and is generally full of beans although she has quite bad mood swings. She feels shameful and isolated and wants to put the whole event behind her. We have paid her £50 from the fund to get her established and as a contribution to her housing. She is helping her Aunty out around the two-bed house they share together and running errands to the state capital, Benin. In the absence of her parents, Tanya and I are paying her a small stipend to support her rehabilitation and she told us yesterday that she is using the money to enrol as a sewing apprentice with a view to opening her own business
We had lost touch with our second contact in Dubai Bindy, despite frantically ringing her work phone over the last 10 days. Out of the blue, she made contact last Thursday through Facebook to say she had just landed in Lagos. After a severe beating, she had run away with only her slippers and work dress. She survived on the streets for four days by begging from tourists and manged to telephone her parents in Nigeria. Her family are poor and unemployed but Bindy’s Uncle was able to arrange for an emergency loan from the village cooperative bank for the £300 airfare.
Bindy has been very weary and upset this week. Her parents were shocked and horrified at her experience having spent the last 8 months believing their daughter was working a lucrative sales job in Dubai. Bindy feels shameful and silly at having been so easily tricked. As with most women trafficked for sex from Nigeria, it was a friend of a friend who recruited her locally.
We have paid Bindy £50 from the fund to cover the immediate interest repayments and to provide her with basics for the month. Sadly she is now laid low with a bout of malaria and with your support we were able to send her £110 today to cover the intravenous medication she needs in the state hospital. For context, the average salary in Nigeria is £20 per week, although unskilled people in rural areas earn considerably less.
We now have identified the flat where the girls were accommodated on Google Street View. We have also discovered that the owner is also running another apartment around the corner with 16 women trafficked from Nigeria, again for sex. This is obviously way too many for us to deal with so the best we can do is gather as much information as we can and include this in our final submissions.
We have now established contact with two organisations in Edo State, Nigeria; one an NGO rehabilitating and educating trafficked women and the other, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons. Some 96% of all women trafficked for sex in Nigeria come from Edo State, most ending up in Italian night clubs. We have been busy gathering data about these poor women and will in time hand this over to NAPTP and to Interpol who has an office in Dubai.
We hope to have some exciting publicity news later this week but in the meantime, we continue to monitor the situation with the intention of going to Dubai for the three remaining women in mid-February. Thank you for your support and please do spread the word, a little money really does go a long way to change lives.
