Impossible is a Dare

by Cooley, Ben;

  ‘I need sound and lighting for an arena,’ I said to them. The guy who worked there emailed me a quote. I felt a little bit sick and then I rang him up: ‘I’m really sorry man; I didn’t want to buy the equipment. I only just wanted to rent it for the day.’

  I was met with the same long pause.

  ‘That is the day rental cost, Ben.’

  Putting on this event was not going to be a walk in the park!

  From that moment all the prices and numbers we were talking about, the figures being thrown around, the cost of this and the cost of that, all seemed so beyond our reach. Each time another matter was mentioned I’d think ‘Damn, really?!’ I really didn’t have the first idea about the practicalities of hiring a huge venue like this or even about getting people to come.

  And for all the support we received, for all the encouragement, there were the ones who thought we were crazy. Many people would make throwaway comments like: ‘You know no-one will go to that kind of thing?’ ‘It’s a waste of time organizing it!’, ‘Who’s going to travel from Manchester to Birmingham?’ You know, as if it were the furthest distance you could imagine!

  ‘It’s less than two hours away! Why would anyone not care enough?’ Deb would say to me. I didn’t know either. Maybe it was naivety, maybe it was ignorance, but we just thought: ‘It’s important; of course people will come!’ In those moments we believed with a childlike faith that people would come. As a Christian, I believe the Bible when it says that God uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. And it’s a good job too, because in those moments we didn’t have a clue!

  After I’d finally plucked up the courage to book the arena, we had another setback. The arena had received a counter-booking offer and so to secure the date they needed our deposit, and fast. Suddenly we had to provide thousands of pounds of deposit or we were going to lose the venue. There was nothing in our bank accounts. We had no chance. And no way to raise that kind of money personally. Humbly, we had to approach anyone we could think of who might just have that kind of money to spare. I made some phone calls, asked some people. And do you know what? Most of the people I expected to say ‘yes’ said ‘no’. And then the money came in, just when we needed it, from a completely unexpected source.

  You see, we were trying to get people to buy into a vision. That’s hard for any organization, even long-established ones. In many cases these organizations that have been around for a while build on the reputation of what they did before. It turns out that when you set up an organization, you don’t usually set it up with a large event. No, you set it up small, and you build and build so that you can turn to people for support and say: ‘Look, this is what we’ve done in the past; this is what we want to do in the future. Do you want to get involved?’ So more individuals tend to get involved as you go along.

  With The Stand we were asking people to trust us from the start. We had no record of what we had done in the past but we were asking people to support our future. Instead of gathering enough cups of water together to fill a basin, it was like turning on a tap and expecting it to flow to fill a large pool. With The Stand we were saying ‘No, we’re going to go big and we’re going to go hard, and if it goes wrong that’s that!’ So The Stand was a risk, but one many of us were willing to take.

  Another side to the story

  Tim Nelson, International Development Director, Hope for Justice

  I was out for dinner in Los Angeles when the guy I was with told me how he had seen young girls trapped in cages in India with his own eyes. I was disgusted that such injustices were still taking place. ‘You know this is going on in your city as well?’ he said. And then he challenged me, ‘What are you prepared to do about it?’

  I had first heard about the issue through my friend Chris Dacre, who was passionate about doing something about the problem of trafficking. So when I came back from the USA, I challenged him further on it. Soon he was telling me about a trained opera singer called Ben Cooley who was trying to put on a major event to raise awareness about the issue. ‘Maybe you could help him?’ he said.

  When I first met Ben I instantly loved his vision and passion. I also loved his naivety. He just gets so caught up in the fact that ‘We’ve got to make a difference!’ From that moment on I was in.

  I’d done events for my church before, had run host teams and welcome teams, but I’d never started something from scratch. Together Ben and I started to get more and more people on board. Ben, Deb, Rob and Marion worked so hard. We knew we needed to get people to commit to bring coachloads rather than just ones and twos to make it happen. We were doing the best we could with the small team we had. We’d all pulled in friends and family to try and help where we could, and most of us didn’t live anywhere near Birmingham!

  We’d certainly set ourselves a challenge. But I think when you’re going to do something like an event, the real challenge is not in the launch (because people are excited). It’s not in the actual event itself (because then you’re in the moment). The biggest challenge for me came when we were six months into planning and hadn’t had as many people booking tickets as we’d have liked. Your stomach drops and you think: ‘What are we going to do?!’ It happens time and time again. Six months in, the temptation is to pull back, change your strategy, cancel, do something different because to carry on as normal will mean being left with egg on your face. Not Ben. Ben was the kind of gung-ho guy who would say: ‘I don’t care. I feel like this is what we should do. We have got to make this happen!’ That kind of zeal, that kind of passion, is a challenge; it’s something people feel they want to get involved in. I think people could see that authenticity in what we were trying to do with The Stand. Here was an event that wasn’t led by a well-known Christian leader, but an unknown group prepared to take on something colossal. But Ben didn’t want to take it on alone. Good leaders want to include you in their mission; great leaders want to share it with you.

  This is something that has remained with me since my involvement in The Stand right up until today. I’ve had the immense privilege to be on the founding board of the charity and serve on the board until I was able to step full time into working at Hope for Justice as International Development Director. Hope for Justice is about a shared vision, it is about fighting for something together. When you can stop saying ‘they’ about Hope for Justice and you move to saying ‘we’, it changes everything. It shifts from being an outside organization to being one that is inclusive. I would say the same for churches, for businesses, for individuals. When people realize that it’s ‘we’ together rather than ‘they’, then you realize it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.

  I’ve had the privilege of seeing kids who are willing to give every single penny of their pocket money to make a difference, mums who are giving up on luxuries they could have in their household to help bring freedom. I see the commitment from so many who are prepared to get up early, bake cakes for a bake sale or train so they can do a charity walk, all to further ‘our’ mission. It never fails to inspire me how individuals train for a year to be able to run a marathon or give up every spare moment outside of working to help organize a group fundraising event. These are the real modern-day heroes who go the extra mile doing all they can to help. These people are so inspiring. I met a chap who couldn’t walk who was prepared to go on his mobility scooter on a massive journey, one where he would be in a lot of pain: it was so long that he had to get off and change his battery!

  I cannot shake the fact that just a number of meetings – a few meetings with the right individuals – can lead to determination and action that set people free. When I was a kid, my mum always gave me dot-to-dot puzzles to do. I could never work them out: ‘1’ was so far away from ‘2’ and then suddenly the ‘3’ was right beside it. The whole time you don’t quite understand what you’re drawing; it’s only when you step back that you see the full picture. I think the same could be said for the fight against slavery. You meet with one person who is connected to
a person in a different place, who connects you with his or her friend, and suddenly you start to see a pattern emerging that leads to people being set free, that leads to a picture of the end of slavery in a country. It’s that dot-to-dot, and it’s happening all over the world, all at the same time.

  * * *

  Chapter four

  Amaya’s story

  Amaya was 14 when she was tricked into working at a Cambodian brothel. She was forced to service ten men a day, endured beatings and gang rapes and became addicted to drugs. She was treated, she said, as if she wasn’t human. She was a slave.

  Since she was a little girl, Amaya had dreamed of having a good job and earning money to help her mother. She had dreamed of having a hair salon and becoming a pop singer. But after her birth father had passed away and her mother had remarried, Amaya needed to work day and night to earn money to provide for the family. Her family life went downhill. Sometimes they had nothing at all to eat. Amaya felt such a deep sense of disappointment. She was disappointed with her situation, her family unity, her life. She had so many questions. Why did her life turn from bad to worse? Why was her family situation so hopeless? They had no money even though they worked so hard.

  One day a relative of Amaya’s was drunk. He raped her. She felt angry and afraid. During that time she kept the rape a secret. She was full of shame and did not know how to explain it to anyone. She could not tell her mother what had happened and was so ashamed she went to live with a friend. Then that friend brought Amaya to work in a place without telling her what kind of job it was: Amaya was taken to a brothel.

  Previously Amaya had thought her life was in as bad a place as it could possibly be, but now she felt more depressed than she had ever thought possible. One day a group of clients raped Amaya in a graveyard. They took turns to abuse her, taking great delight in their carnal gratification. Once they had finished with her limp body, they left her alone. She was not allowed time to rest or recover, but was forced to return to work to service customers, one after another, only a few minutes each time. She cried as her ‘customers’ abused her.

  Amaya felt her life was like a doormat for others to step on and use as they liked. But then things changed. A group of police officers came to rescue her and many other exploited girls. Despite being their rescuers, they spoke to the girls with no respect at all, calling them ‘bitches’ and making them feel like scum. After Amaya was rescued by the police she was referred to Hope for Justice and began her rehabilitation programme.

  Amaya worked through her trauma and began healing from the pain of her past. She began to discover a new dream for her future. When she was brought to Hope for Justice, for the first time in many, many years she felt excited. She felt happy. She was now in a family-like atmosphere that made her feel warm, loved and valued.

  Graduating the Hope for Justice programme, Amaya went on to become a licensed yoga instructor and now works with ‘at risk’ children. She is happily married and has a young child.

  Welcome to Mumbai

  It was the smell that hit me first. I had never encountered such a smell. And such humidity. The air was sticky, thick and hot. Welcome to Mumbai.

  It was my first ever long-haul flight. I’d never been outside the developed world before and had no idea what to expect. This country was like nothing I had ever seen. It was crazy. There were cars, people and animals everywhere. It was absolutely manic. A motorbike passed me with a goat on the back. A goat! In the UK that could make the news; in India it was just another Monday!

  It was Marion White who had put me in touch with a contact in India. He was one of the members of the event’s board and had agreed to pay for me to visit some projects set up to fight slavery. Here I had the incredible opportunity to meet some of the amazing individuals fighting modern-day slavery. These people became heroes to me and humbled me; they weren’t just raising awareness, they were getting people out. They were rescuing. From the top lawyers to talented investigators, this team was actually ‘doing the stuff’ and doing it with such incredible professionalism. I looked at these people and I thought: ‘This is it.’ Suddenly I was seeing sustainable mechanisms for rescue; seeing effective methods to address rule of law; seeing people who could bring more than awareness. People who could bring freedom. Those two weeks in India were life changing. It was then I realized that the focus of our passion should be not just for an event but for a movement.

  I spent every day leaning in, asking questions:

  Why do you do it like this?

  How do you do it like this?

  How do you do investigations?

  How do investigations sit within the law of the land?

  What does it feel like when you do a rescue?

  How do you build a sustainable team?

  I was up all night, reading and thinking of more questions:

  How do you deal with the constant bombardment of negativity?

  How do you cope with the darkness and oppression of the world of slavery?

  How do you maintain a spirit of hope?

  How do you keep your team motivated?

  How do you keep your staff safe?

  The questions just kept coming:

  How do you face children who have been exploited in this way?

  How do you break down criminal syndicates?

  How do you as an NGO relate to government agencies?

  How do you get your funding?

  Is your funding sustainable?

  Do you worry about your funding?

  Does that affect your growth?

  How would you use $1 million to expand your work?

  What’s the relationship between rescue and restoration?

  How does that impact prosecutions?

  How do you make sure it’s not just Mumbai?

  How do you affect the infrastructure of a nation?

  Is what you are doing replicable?

  I didn’t know where these questions were coming from but I had once been told that the best leaders ask the best questions. And so two weeks of question after question – early morning to late at night – I listened for their answers and tried to soak up their wisdom. I was exhilarated; they, on the other hand, were exhausted. Then one day, after I had asked every question I could think of, they turned to ask me one: ‘Ben, do you want to see it?’

  Ever since I had been made aware of the problem of human trafficking in that meeting in Manchester Town Hall, I had become incredibly passionate about the issue. But for some reason I had never thought I would see it first hand. Even when I went to India, I was going in order to understand the cause in more detail, to ask questions and support organizations like these guys who were doing incredible work. Perhaps it was my naivety again, but I didn’t think they’d ever ask me if I wanted to see it. And now that they had, everything in me wanted to say ‘no’. But I knew in my heart the answer was ‘yes’.

  We meet in a coffee shop not far from central Mumbai. I’d been told by a member of our team to pose as a paedophile. The guy who meets us is one of our guys, but he has built up a rapport with some of the local pimps. We get in the car together. There are three of us. It’s night time. The air is sticky. Then the pimp gets in.

  He is going to find us children. I hear him talking. The things I hear him say are some of the most horrendous words I have ever heard. For the first time I am meeting someone who not only thinks it is all right to abuse children, but makes his living from it. He profits from their pain, he profits from their abuse.

  I am calm but conflicted. He takes us to this brothel. The building looks awful. There are huge steel doors. No light. It’s a warehouse. Nothing to suggest what goes on inside. People simply walk by. Opposite us is another really old run-down building, another one people just walk past. But suddenly I hear music coming from it. The more it plays, the more I recognize it. ‘Did you feel the mountains tremble?’ The words rang out: they were playing a Delirious? song. The unassuming building across from us is a church!

&
nbsp; We turn back to our building and the rusted brothel doors open. I don’t get scared easily; I’m usually pretty self-assured. But in this moment, fear sets in. I’m not scared for my life; I’m scared of the unknown. I didn’t know what was behind the door. As much as the team in India has told me, no-one could describe what it felt like in reality. No-one could explain the monstrosity of human trafficking in words.

  Suddenly panic sets in, and not just for me. Our undercover operative seems to panic. The pimp begins to panic. They have let us in too early. There is a policewoman ahead of me. My mind is racing. ‘What happens next?’ I think. ‘Are we going to get arrested? Are we going to jail? How will we explain this to the police?’

  But the policewoman isn’t there to administer justice. She is there to accept her weekly bribe. That was the first moment I sensed injustice. Justice means the correct use of power and authority. Injustice is the exact opposite. That policewoman had the power and authority to make a difference, but she was misusing that for her own benefit. Suddenly the enormity of human trafficking became all the more real. We were standing in a place where we could buy a child.

  We are taken to a room. The metal door slams behind us and the steel bolt shook me as it locked. We have nowhere to run. No way of getting out. A woman is talking to our operative, part in English, part in Hindi. I can’t understand it all. We are led out of that room into a more presentable one. We all sit down on this L-shaped sofa. Then the pimp starts asking me questions: ‘What type of girl do you want? How old you want her to be?’ He uses language that makes my skin crawl. The way he is describing the girls to be revealed is disgusting. Interrupting his questions, a woman comes in and offers us drinks. But I don’t want a drink; it’s the last thing I want right now. Next she informs us that she doesn’t have any young girls who match our criteria, not because she doesn’t have any in the building but because they are with other men. She offers us some alternative girls. Would we be interested in looking at them? Would we like to see them? Once again, though everything in me is screaming no, the answer given is a simple yes.