jump start

My friend Gary Lundy wrote this. It's lovely, sensual, wonderful...

short

to begin to jump-
start we took two
cables one red one

black to positive to
ground and I started
one car gave it

gas as you coaxed
the other car whined
and whined till the

cables so hot smoke
rose the rubber
bucked not knowing

what else to say I
said want a jump-
start and you smiled

all blush replied
mine's so hot your
engine'd blow up

What's going on?

Hmmm... I am trying to balance a new relationship, a diverse array of paid work, and a bunch of volunteer work. I'm spending a bit too much time on the relationship...oops... but it sure is fun, and I'm really happy. I have to spend the next five days working my butt off though--today I focus on surveillance equipment, tomorrow organic spirits, and this weekend the various articles I'm writing for Mountain Flyer.

Keith Ladzinski, Lauren Lee (his girlfriend), Madaleine, and I are heading down to Mexico the end of next week--yay! I'm not sure how long I'll be gone. Keith (the photographer) and I are working on a writing/photo assignment and we are trying to get a second assignment, which would lengthen our stay down there and extend our trip beyond Mexico City. We shall see. Wish us luck. We are all psyched to travel and climb. I don't know Keith very well, and I've never met Lauren, but they sure have a lot of positive energy between the two of them, so it's bound to be a fun trip. Madaleine is excited to just climb a bunch. I'm also looking forward to climbing, though i'm still rehabbing my shoulder. Yesterday I climbed at the BRC, and it felt really good. Granted, I'm limiting my efforts to easy stuff, but still, I can stress the shoulder a bit now. How exciting!

Ballet, church, and Mexico food for Saturday night

I attended the ballet last night in Fort Collins (review pasted below), after eating a delish dinner at a Mexican Restaurant and attending Timberline Church with my friend Justin. Though I'm not Christian, I typically enjoy the messages disseminated at churches, especially nondenominational ones. I am often struck by how similar the messages are to my Buddhist teachings. Cool stuff. The pastor was great--Jeff something--from Britain. He made me laugh.

Gamonet Ballet

I am far from a connoisseur of the ballet, having seen only a half-dozen performances in my lifetime (three of which were the “Nutcracker”). But I do have an idea in my head about what ballet “should” look like—graceful yet restrained arm positions, repetition of movement, and a series of acts telling a cohesive status quo story. Thus, it was with great surprise that I found myself watching (and enjoying) some really nutty, comical, and event theme-less ballet at the Lincoln Center this past weekend.

Contemporary ballet, as performed by Miami’s Gamonet Ballet, retains some aspects of the traditional—the elegance of the dancers, the erect spines, the gorgeous costumes and perfect bodies—but that’s where the similarities end. I (and the rest of the audience) didn’t know quite what to make of the first Act, “Recitations,” with music by Georges Aperghis. First, three drag-queen-like women, clad in white, futuristic, quill-covered costumes and huge foam-like, pointed wigs, appeared on stage, twittering around like hummingbirds. They “danced,” or rather conversed to nonsensical French lyrics with silly facial expressions, providing an interlude to slightly more serious routines performed by more subdued and ballet-like dancers.

“It was two different worlds that you don’t necessarily put together, but I did,” said choreographer and founder of the company, Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros, of melding the drag queen vignettes with the dance routines. “The first piece is basically a nonsense piece; it doesn’t have a storyline. The point of the piece is to make you wonder what the heck happened. What is it? The answer is, as long as you ask what was going on, it’s really fulfilling the purpose of the piece.”

He definitely achieved his goal of complementing the strange music with equally strange dancing in the first act, and he dumbfounded the audience, which was mostly silent upon its completion, only starting to clap as the shock wore off.

Gamonet carried the weird vibe into the slightly eerie second act. More graceful and traditional (excepting the bald headed dancers), “But I Never Saw Another Butterfly Again” showcased eight female dancers, elegantly clad in icy-blue and green flowing dresses, performing to music by Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki. Though lovely, it didn’t strike my fancy as much as the third act, “Nous Sommes.” Set to an operatic “Songs of the Auvergne,” it included two strikingly beautiful dancers enacting a dreamy romance through stunning lifts, stylish footwork, and absolutely gorgeous partnering. Called an “adagio,” this vignette is considered the director’s signature style, and it really struck the audience, which, in relief for the familiar and in appreciation of the perfect execution, clapped heartily.

Mood, style, and originality were factors Gamonet considered when choosing the music for this ballet, he explained. Though more traditional in feel, “Nous Sommes” still exemplified his progressive approach. He created some unusual floor work (literally movement enacted on the floor of the stage) and a different mood for the piece. Though clearly a love story, the dancers seemed so ethereal in their union that they would disappear into each other or into the air if you didn’t watch them closely enough.

Gamonet explained, “You want to do something that goes away from what you are hearing in order to create some sort of contrast; otherwise it becomes too predictable. You want to know how to complement the music instead of following it. How can you complement the music visually?”

The show closed with “Les Echanges,” a humorous collection of routines set to some rhythmically choppy music that I didn’t particularly enjoy, but that offered some fun moments for the audience.
All in all, the performance showcased some unusual choreography, and music that, if not melodic, was distinctive. And, the professional dancers clearly fit the personality needs for Gamonet’s atypical style. Finding a good dancer is like finding a good actor, Gamonet explained. “When a dancer is able to digest and really make that which she is dealing with her own, and once she is able to create her own comment through her technique, flexibility, and speed, then she goes beyond mere flexibility.” That is when, he added, her flexibility goes beyond a physical quality.

Ballet, he continued, is a metaphor. “It’s a way to communicate with the outside world, without a word … physically. Sometimes when you are less loud, you’re able to convey a lot more to people because you believe their imagination is open. It makes them think more.”

In his unusual ballet, Gamonet certainly succeeded in opening the minds and experiences of the Fort Collins audience.

Mexico, climbing, and Constance E. Cook

This is neat. My dad sent me this email a few days ago (pasted below)

I'm still sick--it has migrated deep into my lungs. I've been sick for most of January with just a short break during the ice fest. Sigh. I hope it gets better by the time I go to Mexico early February. I'm heading down there with Madaleine, Keith Ladzinski, and Lauren Lee. Keith and I are writing an article on climbing outside of Mexico City, and we're also hoping to get another article about climbing and surfing with a different magazine. We shall see. We hope to travel for two to four weeks, depending on the article situation. Life is good.

Liz-

It's fascinating how things from one's past come up so unexpectedly. This woman was one to two republicans in my whole life (the other was Jacob Javitz, Senator, NY) whom I voted for. When your mother and I were living in Groton, NY while I was going to Cornell and she was teaching in Groton, I routinely traveled the 20 miles to Ithaca to School. One terrible winter, I was coming home in the dark and hit a huge pothole at a construction site. It blew my tire which I had to change in v ery cold temps and in the dark. I was enraged that the construction company would be so negligent and so I looked up my representative in the state assembly in the phonebook and called her. SHE ANSWERED at her home, and the very next morning the pot hole and all the others were fixed. She had my vote forever. This is what I mean about politics being a noble profession. She made it work very well. As her obituary reads, she did awfully well otherwise at her chosen profession.

Dad

Constance E. Cook, 89, Who Wrote Abortion Law, Is Dead
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: January 24, 2009
Constance E. Cook, a former New York State assemblywoman who was co-author of the law that legalized abortion in the state three years before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, died Tuesday at her home in Ithaca, N.Y. She was 89.

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Constance E. Cook as her bill was approved in April 1970.

Her daughter, Catherine Cook, confirmed the death.

Mrs. Cook, a Republican, represented the 128th Assembly District, which then included Tompkins, Yates and Seneca Counties, from 1962 to 1974, and took pride in her support for the expansion of the State University system.

But her most significant influence came with the passage, on April 10, 1970, of the abortion-rights law that she wrote with State Senator Franz S. Leichter, a Manhattan Democrat. Three decades later, she seemed modest about it.

“I didn’t really have a sense at that time that we had done something momentous, though it was long overdue,” Mrs. Cook told The New York Times in April 2000. “Looking back now, it seems like a bigger deal.”

Attempts to loosen New York’s abortion prohibition had failed throughout the 1960s. Then, on March 18, 1970, after a raucous five-hour debate, the State Senate passed the Cook-Leichter bill, which contained no restrictions on the procedure, by a 31-to-26 vote. That set the stage for an even more dramatic vote in the Assembly. With chances for passage deemed more difficult, the bill was amended to allow unrestricted abortion up to 24 weeks, but after that only to protect the pregnant woman’s life.

Midway through the roll call, Assemblyman George M. Michaels, a Democrat from a heavily Roman Catholic district in central New York, quietly voted no. The count ended at 74 to 74, with one Assembly member absent. The speaker, Perry B. Duryea Jr., a Montauk Republican, had not voted, in keeping with the tradition that the speaker votes only if it affects the outcome. Before the clerk could bring the vote to a close, Assemblyman Michaels stood and asked to change his vote.

“I fully appreciate that this is the termination of my political career,” he said. He was right.

Mr. Duryea cast the final “aye” vote, making it 76 to 73. The next day, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the law. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade ruling, patterned in part on the New York law.

Constance Eberhardt was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on Aug. 17, 1919, one of three children of Walter and Catherine Sellmann Cook. Besides her daughter, Mrs. Cook is survived by a son, John; a sister, Marjorie Haupt; and three grandchildren. Her husband, Alfred, died in 1998.

Mrs. Cook graduated from Cornell in 1941 and earned her law degree there in 1943. After law school, she went to work at a Wall Street law firm. Five years later, she moved to Ithaca, where she met Mr. Cook. She became a legal assistant to Assemblyman Ray S. Ashberry. When he retired, she successfully ran for his Assembly seat. In 1976, Mrs. Cook became the first woman to be a vice president of Cornell, as vice president for land grant affairs.

That year, she took up the cause of the Rev. Betty Bone Schiess, one of 11 women who had been ordained to the Episcopal priesthood by reformist bishops. But Bishop Ned Cole, of the Diocese of Central New York, refused to license her.

Mrs. Cook took the case to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled in Ms. Schiess’s favor. In July 1976, the General Convention of the church passed a resolution declaring that “no one shall be denied access” to ordination on the basis of sex.

“The overwhelming support that we got in our efforts to challenge the church through the law was one of the things that made for change,” Ms. Schiess said on Friday. “Nothing significant would have happened without the attention of Constance Cook.”

Appreciating each day

Today I woke up with a renewed determination to appreciate every day as much as possible. I don't want to waste time gossiping or worrying about the future, dwelling on the past, or thinking negative thoughts. I know that as she faced death for years, Sean learned to appreciate every day to its fullest, which is why she lived so vibrantly and positively. I am going to wear the HERA bracelet for as long as I can (until I lose it) to remind myself to remember Sean's attitude toward life.

I climbed the First Flatiron a few days ago with Madaleine, and while up there turned my face to the East. The calm I felt and the balance I experienced on the slab of sandstone, along with the warmth of the sun on my skin... I'm sending that feeling to Sean every day now as she transitions into the next life.

Goodbye Sean

Sean Patrick died yesterday. One of the most inspiring women in my life, Sean taught me many things, the most important one being that you should cherish every moment of your life as much as possible and live your life to the fullest.

I wrote her this note the night she died.

Hi Sean,
I know that you are dying right now and you will not be reading this note. I just wanted you to know that you are a huge inspiration for me. You are one of the most amazing women I've ever met. You are beautiful, bright, and vivacious. I feel so incredibly lucky that we are friends. I wish you the best in your passing to the next realms of existence. I will pray for you and send you uplifting, positive energy over the next few days. I wish you the best. Thank you so much for making my life and this world a better place.
Much love, Lizzy

I am going to work harder to pursue a publisher for the book I have wanted to write about her for years. I have the material--three days worth of interviews with her.

Death

One of my friends and mentors is dying right now. It will take a few days. I'm going to meditate tonight from 7-9 at the Shambhala Center on her passing in hopes that it helps her go on to the next life with peace. I will do the same for the next few days until she dies. Any friends who read this, please take a few minutes to think positive thoughts for her.

Jennie Flomo's story

This is the story about one of the girls that Heidi and I support through Girls Education International, our nonprofit. Jennie is the youngest child in the scholarship program in Bong County. She attends the Methodist School in Gbarnga. This is an illustration of why I am dedicated to educating girls. When given the chance, women can do anything they set their mind to. I'm hoping to visit Liberia later this year, potentially this fall, to visit the girls in our scholarship program.

Story by Lizzy Scully and Emily Sherman-Davis

Before the Girls Education Scholarship Program, 11-year-old Jennie Flomo was following in the footsteps of her older sister.

"My older sister went to school through sixth grade, but then dropped out because she was not encouraged by our parents,” Jennie explains. Plus, the burden of school fees overwhelmed the family. Though Jennie’s three brothers were kept in school, she was forced to drop out after the third grade. At home she took on many responsibilities, including helping her mother sell small condiments door-to-door or at the market. She also helped to do the laundry and cooked, which sometimes meant she had to go to the fields to look for firewood.


Liberia Scholarship Project Manager Emily Sherman-Davis met Jennie at the Methodist School when she went to do the assessment and selection for the girls in Bong County, April 2008.

“I had just completed the interview and had selected the ten girls we needed for the scholarship at Methodist,” Sherman-Davis says. “On my way outside the building I met Jennie, a shy little girl in an worn-out dress outside the verandah. She walked up to me, greeted me with her head bowed, and asked: ‘Are you the woman that has come with the scholarship?’”

That day, Jennie had come to school that day to register, despite the fact that she wasn’t sure if her parents could pay the school fees.

Jennie then personally asked Sherman-Davis for help. “It is not a normal thing for a young person to easily approach an older person and make a request,” she explains. Sherman-Davis was moved, and assuming Jennie must be intelligent and dedicated to her studies, she commenced with a discussion about the possibilities of a scholarship for the child.

“I did not promise her anything,” says Sherman-Davis, “but I sent her name to the GEI in the United States, and her name was accepted for the scholarship
.”

“When I told Jennie that she was accepted on the scholarship upon my return to Gbarnga to distribute letters to recipients and pay first semester fees, she was so happy that she ran up and down the school campus exclaiming, ‘I am so happy I want to run home and tell my parents that I got a scholarship that will pay my fees!’” 


Jennie is now in Grade four and is among the first three students in her class. Her first period average is 85 (B+). The GEI Scholarship has paid the fees for Jennie's education.

Recently Jennie told Sherman-Davis: "It is because of the scholarship that I was able to pass all my subjects this period.”

Ice Fest

I went to the Ouray Ice Fest this past weekend, sort of. I missed all the competitions because I arrived late on Saturday and wanted to sit in the hot springs for three hours. I managed to make it to the Petzl party Saturday night, which was a blast, despite the bad music, and I saw Mike Libecki's very entertaining video/slide show on climbing big walls in Antartica. That fellow is pretty wild and adventurous, and a nice guy. We grabbed a beer after the show and he talked about his daughter, Lilianna, to whom he is totally dedicated. His adventures in the mountains are neat, but I admire him more for the things he does with her. I also managed to get some good time in with multiple friends--snowboarding with Christina; hot springing with Nan and her baby, Livi; and tea with Melissa. It was a lovely weekend. not much more to report. :)

Life is good

Life has improved immensely over the last few months. I just got more work with Mountain Flyer magazine, which is a really beautiful, colorful mag. I have five article due over the next few months, two this month; I also got some work with a surveillance equipment company. It's called SecurWireless, and it's a very interesting company. I'm learning all sorts of cool things about surveillance equipment. It seems like a great company to be affiliated with for a variety of reasons, the main one being they have an outstanding product that nobody else markets. I'm excited about the work. Also, I applied for hardship assistance with Citimortgage and actually received help on my mortgage. I wasn't at risk of actually losing my house because my mother is very generous and offered to help keep that from happening. However, I was looking at renting the whole place out and living with my brother in Lakewood. I love my brother, and he has a cute condo, but it would be hard for me to live in the middle of the city after living on the gorgeous open space of Lyons. I am so lucky. Finally, as things seem to often come in threes, I just started dating a really wonderful, beautiful, kind, and intelligent person. I am feeling good. However, I think I learned some good lessons this past year. I am not going to get too excited about anything because you never know when things will change. Things are good, and I am so appreciative of that fact, but I am going to do my best to remain surprised by each of the wonderful things that happens to me every day. I'm also going to try to spread that good energy around as much as possible, especially to the 11,000 people who, right now, in Boulder, CO, have had to evacuate their homes because a fire is raging across the foothills. Today was windy as hell, and apparently some power lines blew down. I watched the fire as I drove home from my dear friend Seneca's house. It spread across the foothills, heading into Boulder, and was like a wall of fire with giant plumes of glowing smoke. I feel for the people.
I am listening to Pema Chodron every day, typically twice per day. Because i wake up every night without fail, unless I get a huge amount of exercise the day before, I am listening to Buddhist teachings rather than wallowing in depression and bad emotions (which seem to plague me most intensely at night). Listening to her helps me fall asleep again, and it keeps me present. Instead of allowing my mind to wander to all my past transgressions, embarrassments, awful experiences, I listen to Pema, and I try to internalize her teachings. The most significant thing I've learned over the past six weeks, after listening to the same CD about 50 times, is that I now know that I can't possibly understand what people are saying when they just tell me something one time. I mean, I do to a certain degree, but there is so much that I'm missing. And that is because I have so many projections that I put onto everything people say and do. Instead of seeing them for who they are and really understanding what they say from the heart, I am just hearing/seeing things according to my own beliefs. How do I know this? Well, every time I listen to Pema's CD I learn something new. Sometimes I had to hear the same things 30, 40, or 50 times to understand. I finally have finished with the first set of CDs and I'm moving onto "This Moment Is The Perfect Teacher." I figured that was an appropriate next CD to listen to :)
Enough rambling. Good night.

Article on Cyclocross in Mountain Flyer

I covered my first Cyclocross competition for Mountain Flyer magazine. You can read my article and see photos by Eddie Clark on their Web site. Click here.

It was a super neat event; I'd really love to actually try it. It doesn't look as dangerous as mountain biking, but it looks more interesting and grueling than road biking.

Here's a sampler:

Pale Skin, Pale Skies and Pale Ale - Oskar Blues Cross Race Caps off the 'Cross Season

By Lizzy Scully
Images by Eddie Clark
Frontline Report brought to you by Oskar Blues Brewery:

(January 3, 2008) Lyons, Colo. - More than 100 racers, including nearly 20 pros, gritted their teeth through 30-degree temps for the Lyons Oskar Blues Cross Race this past Saturday, January 3. Almost three weeks after the official end of the season and following the holidays, most racers had already stopped training for cyclocross. However, this didn't dampen the good-natured competition and aggressive riding of the day.

Sunrise and Shirin Ebadi

I watched the sun rise from my picture window this morning. Between the two mountains that frame the valley of Lyons, the sky was a deep lime green, with layers of deep blues above that. Orange and dark pink clouds lay layer upon layer over the green and blue sky, turning golden yellow over the five minutes that I watched. Beautiful sun rises are as elusive as love.

Each day I wonder where I will be and what I will be doing in a month. I have applied for jobs all over the United States. I seek a communications position that will allow me to write and edit often, but also plan strategies for successful PR campaigns. I want to work for a nonprofit or for a company that does something beneficial for the world. I have a few prospects; I have made the first round of interviews for a position in CA and one in DC, and a company in Louisville, CO, appears to be very interested. I need to find something soon because the freelance work I survived on last year has piddled away. I still have work with R&I, RMS, Mtn. Flyer, and the Berthoud Recorder, but that is not enough to sustain me. I would be quite sad to leave Colorado, but on the other hand, I'm really excited about finding an interesting job where I can learn and give back to the world community. We shall see. Wish me luck. Times are tough for everyone.

This morning I also came across this NY Time editorial. I never heard of Shirin Ebadi, but she sounds like someone who I'd love to get to know.

The Woman the Mullahs Fear
Published: January 1, 2009
Men hold all of the meaningful levers of political power in Iran, but it is a woman they fear. If not, why is the mullah-led government trying to shut down the operations of Shirin Ebadi?

The Board Blog
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.
Go to The Board »
Ms. Ebadi, a lawyer and her country’s leading human rights activist, is the first Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. On Monday, the authorities stormed her private office, seizing her computers and her clients’ documents. A week earlier, they closed her Center for Defenders of Human Rights, a coalition of human rights groups and other activists whose members had planned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

When she was awarded the peace prize in 2003, the Nobel committee called Ms. Ebadi “a courageous person” for standing up against Iran’s bullying government. In the years since, she has endured repeated death threats from radical groups and regular government intimidation. That courage has never faltered.

With presidential elections scheduled for June, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies apparently decided they could not risk letting Ms. Ebadi continue the work she has done with distinction (and without pay) for the past 15 years — exposing government violations of human rights and defending human rights and democracy activists.

No doubt the authorities were unhappy with a report produced by her center that was cited recently by the United Nations’ secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, when the General Assembly approved a nonbinding resolution condemning Iran’s human rights record. But we suspect their ambitions go far beyond trying to suppress one report. They are clearly hoping to intimidate Ms. Ebadi and all other independent voices in Iran. That must not be allowed to happen.

We condemn Tehran’s mistreatment of this woman of extraordinary honor and courage. We urge the United States, Europe and other major powers to keep pressure on Iran to ensure that no further harm comes to Ms. Ebadi and that she remains free to do her essential work.

If Tehran wants relief from international criticism about its human rights record, it must start by adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and respecting the rights of all of its citizens.

Cambodia sex slaves

I really admire and appreciate Nicholas D. Kristof for his consistent, in-depth coverage of the sex trade. This article was published today in the New York Times.

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.

But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.

After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.

“My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable.

Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.

“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.

Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.

After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.

I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.

“I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.”

“Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.”

Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!”

Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.

Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I’ll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina’s own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn’t.

I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.