Human trafficking and exploitation of people is a crime and has happened in southeastern Manitoba.

Flo Friesen has been working in Central Asia for 25 years through Evangelical Mennonite Conference under the umbrella of Millennium Relief and Development. Friesen says she is an english teacher by profession and taught at the university in the former Soviet Union. She explains, "I got to know so many women and just grew to love them so deeply, then started to hear their stories."

Friesen says she heard lots about domestic violence and she started a conference for Christian women to probe the issue of women in prostitution as well as human trafficking.

"I'll call her Gulia and she was only 16," says Friesen, recalling a story about a girl she met. "She was abused by her mother, as in physically beaten. She finally ran away and went to a bar and met a guy there. He said, 'Oh, I love you, I will help you, I'll take care of you.' Then the upshot of that was he sold her to all his friends. She was so unaware of this whole issue. She said, 'it was so horrible, I didn't even know at the end of the day how many men I had served.'"

Friesen adds Gulia was thrown into the streets one cold night and she thought she was going to die, but then she heard a voice say, 'Stop. This is enough.' She says Gulia let her feet guide her and she ended up at a church where a partner organization of Friesen's took Gulia in, gave her safe shelter.

Executive Director Pam Hadder from Agape House in Steinbach says trafficking can come in the form of sexual exploitation but it is also seen in the form of nannying for a family or working at an establishment. Hadder notes with human trafficking the individual is working in whatever capacity to pay off the debt to the person who purchased them. She adds human trafficking does happen in southeastern Manitoba.

This year's theme for Human Trafficking Awareness Day is hope. Friesen says, like many words, hope is an emotionally loaded word.

"My hope would be acknowledgment because before we can start to remedy situations, we have to acknowledge that there is an issue. We deal a lot with the aftermath and ongoing issues related to family violence and abuses within families. Similarly, with sexual exploitation there is a lot of shame and denial. It makes people feel uncomfortable so they don't want to discuss it. We all would like to believe that things were better and these terrible things were not happening in our communities but the reality is that they are. So I would say my hope would be an increased awareness and acceptance that this is a reality in our communities."

Friesen says after hearing so many stories of woman who have been trafficked her heart was with these women and getting involved to help seemed like the obvious thing to do. With her work Friesen says first they rescue the women, but they also have a rehabilitation program where they retrain them for different jobs, one of which is making jewelry, scarves and handbags out of yak and goat leather.

"I call it The Hope Chest because I love to focus on hope. So I sell the jewelry, scarves and handbags, and they're very different. I do home parties, I speak in women's groups and I speak in churches. If they want I bring my stuff along and people can buy the homemade items. But it's not a business as such for me in that I don't make a profit. All the money goes back into the ministry."

Hadder adds if you know someone who may be taken advantage of in the way of human trafficking the first thing you should do is listen to them and believe what they're telling you. Afterwards there are different resources they can be referred to as well as the Agape Crisis Line: 204-346-0028. She notes the individual who is being trafficked also has the option of calling their local RCMP because human trafficking and exploitation of an individual is a crime.