By IOM Ghana | IOM Ghana team
“I want to be a lawyer. That’s what I’m dreaming of,” said Kwabla, now 22 years old, who was trafficked at 13. “I want to be in that position so that I can defend the rights of others.”
After Kwabla’s father passed away, his mother struggled to make ends meet. It then seemed like a good opportunity when a fisherman offered her to send him to school in exchange for his labour on the lake. Instead, Kwabla found himself working gruelling 13-hour days on Lake Volta, beginning at 4:00 AM every morning. Twice per day, at noon and again in the late evening, he ate a small meal of banku, a dough made of fermented corn and cassava mixture. In between meals and with no time to rest, Kwabla and other trafficked children were tasked with diving into the lake to disentangle fishing nets from the debris, spending long moments underwater, relying on touch rather than sight - a very dangerous task even for children who know how to swim.
Thinking back to his years of working on the lake, Kwabla said that the fishermen, “do not take care of [the children] as theirs, do not protect them. They mishandle [them] and beat [them].
Today, thanks to your kind donations, Kwabla is regularly attending school and is learning the skills that will allow him to realize his dream one day – to be a lawyer that protects the rights of trafficked children.
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