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Leaving

Nearby chickens peck bits of grain. Again, I am waiting. Just when I start questioning why five waiters seem preoccupied with aligning silverware on the empty tables without even glancing our way, I realize the reason for my frustration. I’m at least American enough to expect customer service, efficiency.

I’ve forgotten the lines of my childhood in Bulgaria: for bread, for a stamp, for school shoes. The government provided and we waited. That was the bargain. When the system—our collective provider—crumbled in 1989, Bulgarians and others in the Soviet Bloc continued waiting for someone to provide. The reality of capitalism, of having to act to survive, caught the East unprepared.

My mother and I left right before that happened. Not because we were wiser; we just happened to be going to America in the summer of 1990 to visit my father who was working as a researcher for $10,000/year at John Hopkins University. That job was coming to an end, and my mother and I were to spend the last remaining three months of it learning English and watching the overfed squirrels enjoy a carefree life on the campus grounds. I had just finished 7th grade in Sofia and the following year my family planned to put me in a high school that specialized in languages so that I could become a teacher. That summer in Baltimore would give me a head start.

We left Bulgaria on Balkan Air, my first plane ride, to the land of Beverly Hills
Cop and Flashdance. My Mom had $5 in her pocket and when we landed in JFK
I remember thinking I had never seen so many strange looking people in one place. It reminded me of a western magazine I had seen at a neighbor’s apartment a few years earlier. It might have been National Geographic.

As soon as we arrived, Beverly Hills seemed very far away. Roaches infested the studio my father called home, I wanted to return to the familiar poverty in Bulgaria and counted the days until our visas expired. Then, the letters started arriving. Family and friends back home gave the same instructions: "Whatever it takes, stay there! There is nothing here but misery. Even nursing mothers can't get milk for their children. Stay there and send us dollars."

Even my own friends sent lists of items they needed. My mother and I escaped an economic crisis without realizing it. We left before the first wave of migration.

Life in Baltimore was far from easy. I worked three jobs, attended an inner city public school without knowing English, and watched my mother, also a scientist, exploited and treated like a second class citizen in a racially divided city. But one thing I didn't have to do was sell my body. My generation of girls was raised to believe in science, in progress, in gender equality. I unloaded trucks, served restaurant customers, cleaned houses, but never sold my body.

Even though the first wave of migration in the early 90s drained the brain power of most Eastern European countries, it also saved families from misery. It saved mine.

With the money my parents earned here, we secured better doctors for our ailing grandparents in Bulgaria, built houses for our relatives, installed gas lines for the cold winter months.

Those who had no one abroad rode the bus lines day and night during the winter to stay warm. Beggars—a class we had never seen under Communism, filled the streets of Chisinau, Sofia, Bucharest. Young people took greater and greater risks to get out, to find a way to make money.

It’s no surprise that the underbelly of migration found a way to exploit the desperation. Trafficking. People were sold in other countries as slave labor, never earning the wages promised by recruiters, not even performing the duties they originally signed up for. Instead thousands of men and women were trafficked for labor exploitation in the more
prosperous countries of Europe to build condominiums, to make swim suits and coats, to beg on the street with disabled children, to clean the houses of people who treated them like farm animals.

And young women? They became a commodity sold and resold until completely broken. And even when broken, men paid for sex. There was (and still is) a market for sex with a pregnant woman, with a disabled woman, with a woman whose arms are cut up, whose body reveals cigarette burns on her breasts and stomach. These women come from my generation. Like me, they grew up in the villages, but unlike me, they remained there and became eroticized, sexualized and condemned to paying the highest price of migration -- forced prostitution.

At first the traffickers posed as suitors and travel and employment agencies issued false documents, bribing custom officials, border guards, police officers. The clients ranged from all of the latter to fishermen, tourists, married men, laborers, even UN personnel stationed in the former Yugoslavia in the early 90s. The media exposed the UN officials, so strategies changed. Trafficking became more underground, traffickers changed routes and transport.

The recruiters became women, neighbors, and relatives. So few traffikers were ever prosecuted that the fear of justice was never great enough to dissuade someone from this highly lucrative trade of flesh. Corruption abounds, even in countries like Bulgaria that recently joined the European Union.

The root causes for trafficking are always the same regardless of the country of origin: poverty, desperation, unemployment and abuse.