The legacy of St. Josephine Bakhita: World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking

Today is the annual World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking. The day of prayer is celebrated in the Catholic Church worldwide every Feb. 8, the feast of African-born St. Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese-Italian Canossian religious sister active in Italy for 45 years, after having been a slave in Sudan. In 2000 she was declared a saint by the Catholic Church. In 2015, Pope Francis designated Feb. 8 as St. Josephine’s feast day, and as the World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking. This year will be the sixth iteration. She is also the patron saint of Sudan.

There will be a “Together against trafficking” march Feb. 9, which will start at 10 a.m. from Castel Sant’Angelo and end in St. Peter’s Square at 12 noon local time.

St. Josephine Bakhita was born in 1869 in the west Sudanese village of Olgossa in the Darfur region of Sudan. She was a member of the Daju people and her uncle was a tribal chief. Due to her family lineage, she grew up happy and relatively prosperous, saying that as a child, she did not know suffering (https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=5601).

“Historians believe that sometime in February 1877, Josephine was kidnapped by Arab slave traders,” reports Catholic Online, a project of Your Catholic Voice Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, based in Bakersfield California..

“Although she was just a child, she was forced to walk barefoot over 600 miles to a slave market in El Obeid. She was bought and sold at least twice during the gruelling journey.

“For the next 12 years she would be bought, sold and given away over a dozen times. She spent so much time in captivity that she forgot her original name.

“As a slave, her experiences varied from fair treatment to cruel. Her first owner, a wealthy Arab, gave her to his daughters as a maid. The assignment was easy until she offended her owner’s son, possibly for the crime of breaking a vase. As punishment, she was beaten so severely she was incapacitated for a month. After that, she was sold.

“One of her owners was a Turkish general who gave her to his wife and mother-in-law who both beat her daily. Josephine wrote that as soon as one wound would heal, they would inflict another.

“She told about how the general’s wife ordered her to be scarred. As her mistress watched, ready with a whip, another woman drew patterns on her skin with flour, then cut into her flesh with a blade. She rubbed the wounds with salt to make the scars permanent. She would suffer a total of 114 scars from this abuse.

“In 1883, the Turkish general sold her to the Italian Vice Consul, Callisto Legani. He was a much kinder master and he did not beat her. When it was time for him to return to Italy, she begged to be taken with him, and he agreed.

“After a long and dangerous journey across Sudan, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean, they arrived in Italy. She was given away to another family as a gift and she served them as a nanny.

“Her new family also had dealings in Sudan had when her mistress decided to travel to Sudan without Josephine, she placed her in the custody of the Canossian Sisters in Venice.

“While she was in the custody of the sisters, she came to learn about God. According to Josephine, she had always known about God, who created all things, but she did not know who He was. The sisters answered her questions. She was deeply moved by her time with the sisters and discerned a call to follow Christ.

“When her mistress returned from Sudan, Josephine refused to leave. Her mistress spent three days trying to persuade her to leave the sisters, but Josephine remained steadfast. This caused the superior of the institute for baptismal candidates among the sisters to complain to Italian authorities on Josephine’s behalf.

“The case went to court, and the court found that slavery had been outlawed in Sudan before Josephine was born, so she could not be lawfully made slave. She was declared free.

“For the first time in her life, Josephine was free and could choose what to do with her life. She chose to remain with the Canossian Sisters.

“She was baptized on Jan. 9, 1890 and took the name Josephine Margaret and Fortunata. (Fortunata is the Latin translation for her Arabic name, Bakhita).” St. Josephine professed her vows as a Canossian Sister on Dec. 8, 1896. She died on Feb. 8, 1947.

“Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, explained, “she [St. Josephine] came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her – that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron’, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father’s right hand’. Now she had ‘hope’ – no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me – am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’ Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed’, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.” (Spe Salvi, §3).

Francesca Sabatinelli, of Vatican News, the information system of the Holy See created in June 2015 with the publication of a Motu Proprio by Pope Francis, announcing the creation of a new Dicastery of the Roman Curia: the Vatican Secretariat for Communication, reported today the “numbers paint a grim picture; around the world there are over 40 million victims of modern slavery of which 70 per cent are women, while about 20 per cent are minors.”

Research developed in 2017 by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) found that of the more than “40 million people around the world [who] were victims of modern slavery in 2016 … The research showed that women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting for almost 29 million, or 71 per cent of the overall total,” notes the Diocese of Parramatta in Australia’s New South Wales.

The Catholic Church is joined in speaking out against the evil of human trafficking, by many others, both religious and secular.

The True Story of Canadian Human Trafficking, published in June 2018, was written by my friend Paul Boge, a talented Mennonite Brethren evangelical Christian award-winning book author from Winnipeg. The book, published by Larry Willard, of Castle Quay Books in Pickering, Ont., won three awards last June at the Word Guild annual awards, honouring the best of Canadian Christian writing from 2018. The book won awards in the general market “Life Stories” category, received the Debra Fieguth Social Justice Award and also won the Grace Irwin Award for best book of 2019. N.J. Lindquist and Wendy Elaine Nelles founded the Word Guild in 2002. In 2008, the Word Guild merged with Christian Info Canada (CIC), a registered not-for-profit charitable organization.

Said Boge at the awards last June: “I dedicate the awards to all the survivors of human trafficking and to the victims who need to be rescued. Thank you Joy Smith and all the survivors who helped me with this book. Thank you Larry Norman Willard for publishing the book. Thank you Steve Bell and all the endorsers the book. Thank you Melissa McEachern and Lorie Hartshorn for all your promotion of the book. Thank you Joel Oosterman for your help and support. And thank you to all my friends and family for supporting this work … All award money will be donated to the Joy Smith Foundation to raise awareness about human trafficking in Canada and to rescue victims. For more information you can visit http://www.joysmithfoundation.com.

Boge went onto say, “Human trafficking is happening in every city in Canada. Youth from all backgrounds are at risk. Ninety per cent of all victims of human trafficking in Canada are born and raised in Canada. May God continue to raise up people to fight human trafficking.”

It was little more than four years ago in October 2015, an emergency room doctor in the United States reported finding a small RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, the size of a grain of rice, implanted under the skin of a human trafficking victim he was treating, after getting a triage note that said, “I have a tracker in me.” Each RFID chip is encased in a small capsule, which also contains a copper antenna coil and a capacitor. The chip stores a unique binary number that is transmitted to the scanner.

Human trafficking, while an often hidden problem, is in reality a scourge across a wide spectrum. “The hospitality industry is highly vulnerable to human traffickers especially when it comes to child sexual exploitation and forced prostitution, forced criminality, domestic servitude,” says the EHL Swiss School of Tourism & Hospitality, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Where I have worked for the last five years almost at the Quality Inn & Suites in Thompson, Manitoba, front desk employees and other management and staff receive training such as “DoesYourHotelKnow,” an awareness campaign by ECPAT-USA (formerly End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, based in Bangkok founded in 1990) that alerts hotels and travellers alike to educate themselves about the signs of sex trafficking, with a call to action (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=KllVVJ4seBA&feature=emb_logo).

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Potential for aerosal airbone transmission of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has been studied by U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland and in Canada at Special Pathogens Program Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba

In an op-ed article, “What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola,” published in the New York Times Sept. 11, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, wrote the Ebola scenario “virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

“If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.”

In fact, there has already been some antigenic drift  in the current novel Ebola-Zaire (EBO-Z) subclade from viral samples sequenced in Sierra Leone in June and sequences from Guinea in March three months earlier.

Osterholm is also an international expert on American preparedness for an influenza pandemic, and from 2001 to 2005, served as a special advisor to then–U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on issues related to bio-terrorism and public health preparedness.

Ebola virus causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever with a high fatality rate estimated at about 70 per cent on average. Five Ebola virus species within the genus Ebolavirus are known, including four that cause Ebola virus disease (EVD) in humans:  Zaire, Bundibugyo, Sudan and Taï Forest, while Reston.  the fifth species, has only caused disease in non-human primates.  The current outbreak in West Africa, plus a handful of travel-related additional cases in Madrid in Spain and in the United States in Dallas and New York City, is Ebola Zaire, the deadliest form of the disease in previous outbreaks with case fatality rates of 90 per cent reported.

With more than 10,000 reported cases and more than 5,000 people dead (for what is widely believed to be a vastly under-reported case fatality rate of about 50 per cent), the 2013-14 outbreak  in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone,  Mali, Nigeria and Senegal in West Africa, caused by Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus species), is the 20th, largest and most complex outbreak of EVD in its 38-year history, with more cases and deaths in this outbreak than all others combined, since the disease was first discovered in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks, one in Nzara in Sudan, and the other in Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was then called Zaire, where a Belgian Roman Catholic nun at a small mission hospital was infected. The latter occurred in a village near the Ebola River in what was then northern Zaire, from which the disease and species both takes their  names. When those first cases were reported in the mid-1970s they were from remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests. The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier this month the Ebola outbreak is now over in both Nigeria and Senegal, although the disease is threatening  the Ivory Coast,  which shares a 716-kilometre international border with Liberia in the southwest; a 610-kilometre border with Guinea to the northwest; and a 532-kilometre border with Mali to the north and northwest.

It began last December with an index case in Meliandou, in southeastern Guinea, not far from the borders with both Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Two decades ago, scientists at the  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), based  at Fort Detrick, Maryland, exposed  monkeys to airborne Ebola, which “caused a rapidly fatal disease” in four to five days, they  concluded in their 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology.

The  researchers hypothesized Ebola can spread through air but likely hasn’t in Africa because the equatorial region is generally too warm, with temperatures rarely dropping below 18.3°C or 65°F.

In 2012, Canadian researchers here in Manitoba, led by Gary Kobinger, head of Special Pathogens and Vector Design and Immunotherapy at the Special Pathogens Program of the  Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada on Arlington Street in Winnipeg, along with researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs, which can remain largely healthy and carry Ebola with only minor ill effects, including heavier breathing and mild fever, to monkeys where the disease was fatal, indicating the Ebola virus may spread between species through the air, although the researchers could not  say for certain that is how the transmission actually occurred. Their research was published in  Scientific Reports 2 on Nov. 15, 2012.

The Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg is where some of the world’s deadliest pathogens  – such as Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses and Nipah Virus Encephalitis  – are studied.

In December 1989,  not far away from USAMRIID, in a strip mall in Isaac Newton Square in suburban Reston, Virginia, army scientists  from nearby Fort Detrick, Maryland were called in when monkeys from the Philippines,  kept by Hazelton Research Products for shipment to other U.S. laboratories,  began to die in their cages, one by one, after contracting what is now known as Reston ebolavirus species, the only known form of Ebola that causes disease only in in non-human primates. While the Reston Ebola species can infect humans no one got sick in Virginia 25 years ago and no serious illness or death in humans have been reported to date as a result of human exposure to the the Reston Ebola species. The Reston episode would become a key part of author Richard Preston’s electrifying 1994 non-fiction thriller, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, an earlier version of which had appeared in The New Yorker magazine on Oct. 26, 1992 as “Crisis in the Hot Zone.”

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says in its “Review of Human-to-Human Transmission of Ebola Virus” summary of published information on the current science that “airborne transmission of Ebola virus has been hypothesized but not demonstrated in humans. While Ebola virus can be spread through airborne particles under experimental conditions in animals, this type of spread has not been documented during human EVD outbreaks in settings such as hospitals or households.”

Referring to the USAMRIID experiment that provided the data for the 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology, CDC says, “In the laboratory setting, non-human primates with their heads placed in closed hoods have been exposed to and infected by nebulized aerosols of Ebola virus.”

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