A sixteen year old girl first sold for her kidney then sold from Nepal in to the brothels of India with her newborn son. A young woman drugged on a bus going to the city to get her son much needed medical attention wakes up prisoner in a red light district. A six year old injected with animal steroids to make her more “voluptuous”. Their stories are unimaginable and heartbreaking. And it’s happening while you read this.

It’s estimated that 15,000 to 20,000 Nepali girls are sold, kidnapped and tricked over the porous border in to India (and now also to Middle Eastern countries) each year. They are abducted and abused as young as six and the an average age globally of a trafficking victim is shockingly thirteen years old. One fearless Nepali woman, Anuradha Koirala, has been fighting for almost two decades to save the innocent lives of the women and children of her vulnerable homeland. Her organization, Maiti Nepal, is the leading anti-trafficking non-profit in Nepal. Started it on a mere $14 US dollars in her own home, Ms. Koirala has built shelters, hospices, schools, prevention and transit homes and has border surveillance teams working at eleven of the twenty six Nepal-India borders.

After spending most of the year in 2004 based in Nepal, I first learned about Maiti Nepal. In 2009 a life changing conversation caused me to become actively involved. I spent three months back in Nepal in the beginning of 2010 volunteering and photographing the crucial work that Anuradha and her team do everyday throughout the tiny impoverished country. In addition to telling these stories through images, I have worked tirelessly since 2009 raising funds and awareness to help in this fight to end human trafficking. Knowing that these atrocities are happening is the fuel that lead me to found my own non-profit called Take A Bite Out of Trafficking (TABOOT).

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”  ~ Mother Teresa