By Khalida Sarwari
In honor of human trafficking awareness month, a group of women in Saratoga are taking the epidemic head on.
Inspired by the book, “In Our Backyard” by Nita Belles, half a dozen members of the church’s bible study group came together last summer to form a task force, said Terri Goehner, a founding member of the group who resides in San Jose. Their primary goal, Goehner said, is to raise awareness about the existence of human trafficking in the U.S., and secondly, to educate themselves as well as others about the problem and what they can do to ameliorate it.
The group currently has around 10 active members, the majority of them from Saratoga, San Jose and Los Gatos.
“We are truly grassroots in its truest sense of the word,” Goehner said. “We realize this is a huge problem and we’re not looking to solve the problem, but we’re looking into what we can do individually and collectively to make small dents in this.”
When three San Jose residents were arrested last fall for bringing over people from Spain to work against their will at TapaOle restaurant on Cox Avenue and Utopik Salon on Saratoga- Sunnyvale Road, members of the group who had read Belles’ book weren’t very surprised, Goehner said. For some others, it came as a surprise and even a shock that it happened in a city like Saratoga, she said, adding that the case proves that no city is immune to this particular problem.
“It happens everywhere and under our very noses,” she said. “People ate at that very restaurant and had no idea about it. For a lot of people there is this sense that, ‘Yes, I know there is human trafficking, but it doesn’t happen where I live.’ This literally is in our backyard, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, because it does.”
Last fall, the ladies adopted Advent Group Ministries’ residential care facility for underage victims of human trafficking as a cause to which they donated their time and resources. The la- dies bought Christmas gifts for the facility, which goes by the name “The Nest.” They also undertook a service project where they knitted two dozen blankets for Nest victims. The idea, said Goehner, is to give the victims something tangible to let them know there are people out there who care about them.
“It’s just our way of showing that they are loved, they are valued,” she said.
Throughout January, members of the task force will have a table outside the Saratoga Federated Church on Sundays, where they’ll have resources and copies of Belles’ book, said Goehner. The book looks at the scope of the human trafficking issue here in the U.S.
Goehner said the group’s long-term vision is to join the global effort to eradicate the condition by increasing people’s awareness of the issue and equipping them with tools so that if they see potential victims, they’ll know what to do and where to report it.
“Human trafficking is not something that happens in Third World countries,” Goehner said. “It is very real, and it happens in the U.S.”
Anyone can join the Saratoga Federated Church’s human trafficking task force. The group is open to even those outside the church community, as long as they are passionate about the human trafficking issue, Goehner said.
