Overview

It’s day 11 of this  deployment and a lot has happened. We’ve had eight people sick, an  attempted mugging, identified over a dozen minors and had personnel need  to go home early. It’s been exhausting but fulfilling.  Yesterday our team took some much needed time off to recharge. This has  enabled us to recommence operations this  afternoon, continuing well into the night.

This trip kicked off with  four days of training in a neighbouring country and we are now seven  days into the live operation. As always, we can’t give many details…  but I can say that we’ve identified over a dozen  minors that are in our sights, and at least three traffickers who we’d  like to see taken down. We expect this number to increase as we ramp up  our efforts.

Reshuffling personnel has  provided some challenges this trip but we fully support the decision of  those who needed to leave early to return home to family. The remaining  new team members have been doing really well,  and we have an additional surveillance member who has been a huge asset  to the team.

A shadow ahead

The other night as three investigators and I were dropped to a well-lit area to walk home, I noticed a shadow ahead. As I focussed, this single shadow soon turned into three. I alerted the others and we turned around and upped the pace. More assailants joined them silently on motorbikes and soon we had seven people closing in on us in the narrow alley.

We broke into a brisk jog, all the while scanning our surroundings for anything we could use to defend ourselves with. They followed us for a short while, but soon after gave up on following us.

While we believe it was most likely a random, unconnected mugging, we have changed up our route to accomodation since then.

Thank you for standing with us