Sunday PM, March 8th

We were able to meet with a member of the Maseru Police Department who works in the Child and Gender Protection Unit. He told us of the existence of human trafficking in Lesotho. He told us that one of the biggest obstacles to preventing human trafficking is that human trafficking has not been clearly and legally defined in the laws of Lesotho government. He said that if a person is discovered who is being enslaved against their will, the only thing that can be done is to take the enslaved person and release her at the border (if she not from Lesotho), then the perpetrator gets a ‘slap on the hand’ and told not to do it again. He had knowledge and had worked directly with the following cases:

—He told us that there was recently an organization which enticed Basotho girls under the premises of getting to study to be a nurse to be taken to the United Kingdom where the were coerced into the sex trade.

—He told us of an Ethiopian woman enslaved by a Basotho man.

—He told us of an orphan village where child labor laws are being violated with the older children being forced to work long, hard hours at the orphanage.

—He told us of Basotho women who ‘sell’ their children—they provide the passport with their child and even accompany their child across the border to be taken under the pretense that money for payment of the child’s supposedly legitimate labor will be sent to the mother on a regular basis.

—He told us that traditionally there was no need for orphanages in Lesotho since the strong tribal ties would dictate that a child be taken in by a relative. With the HIV/AIDS crisis (25% of the population tests positive for HIV) and increased poverty, the number of orphans has increased dramatically in recent years without orphanages or families to keep them.

—There is no governmental regulation of orphanages or even mandatory reporting.

We also spoke with a young pediatrician from Houston who has been in Lesotho since September with a Baylor Medical Center initiative for young pediatricians to help the Basotho children. She told us that until Baylor sent 11 young pediatricians to Lesotho, there was only 1 in the entire country. She also told of treating families of children who had children and teens as heads of families

May God bring more people to help these orphan children of Lesotho.