Modern Slaves: An Interview with Benjamin Skinner

From Salon.com

Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells Salon the shocking truth about human trafficking.

By Hannah Wallace

Mar. 27, 2008 | During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery -- or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking -- is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, "the dark underbelly of globalization."

That slavery in its many forms -- debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution -- still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don't know where to look for it. Skinner's great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales -- of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an "au pair" job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry -- illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.

Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what's wrong with redemptions (also called "buy backs"), and why he's optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.

You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who'd just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?

There were definitely some moments where I felt I'd made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not "Am I going to come out whole?" but "Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?"

I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can't just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.

When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could've paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could've fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could've gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.

Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy's head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm -- she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, "What would my character be doing in this situation?" So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn't. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.

Did the police do anything?

The response from the police was, "These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood." The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania -- and have been for centuries. That's why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.

I kept thinking of Samantha Power's book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term "slavery" to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word "genocide" in "A Problem From Hell.") Colin Powell didn't use "slavery" in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn't use the word "slavery."

There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We've all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.

The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term "slavery" when it's appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard -- they've taken baby steps -- has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you've had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, "OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions." And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they'll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity -- slavery is. If it's a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.

How would you get hit very hard?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you're bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn't have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that's a problem.

The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.

There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a "ripple effect" with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.

Nonsense.

But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent -- in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.

I don't think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven't been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India -- or in a brick kiln or on a farm -- is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we'll be getting somewhere.

Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.

Paul Wellstone's view of this was basically that you can't address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of "The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka." And I'll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That's not what I'm calling for and I don't think that's what Senator Wellstone was calling for.

But if you don't recognize that the primary driver of slavery today is the nexus between withering poverty of extreme marginalized communities with unscrupulous criminals, and you don't address both sides of it -- the criminal side and the socioeconomic side -- you're not going to solve this problem. As long as there's a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival that they will sell their children into slavery, as long as you don't address that, you will always have slavery. And I fundamentally feel that slavery can be ended.

Do you think the TVPA's three-tiered anti-slavery system, which evaluates countries' efforts to eradicate slavery and imposes non-trade sanctions on those who don't do anything to abolish it, works?

I think it's a good thing, but I honesty feel it has outlived its usefulness. You can only slap a country lightly on its wrists so many times and have them notice. After a while it totally loses its effectiveness.


Let's talk about the practice of Redemptions. Are these still going on and is it a viable way to chip away at slavery, buying a slave's freedom one at a time?

There's a long history of it, and not all of it is bad. I find it a very imperfect and unjust way of freeing people. You are essentially acknowledging the right of property in man, by buying them. In recent history, I can't think of any instances where it has worked and been unproblematic.

It's mostly happening in Sudan, right?

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof did it, of course, in Cambodia where he went in and bought two girls in a brothel. And he went back a year later and found that one of the girls was back in the brothel and hooked on methamphetamines.

To take our own history, Lincoln had contemplated buying all slaves from their masters and then setting them free in either Haiti or Liberia. But I think at a certain point -- and I defer to civil war scholars on this -- he realized that this was very much an imperfect justice and what needed to happen was the remaking, through force, of a society that would acknowledge that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which was the initial promise, of course, of the Declaration of Independence.

What you have in Sudan are these evangelicals coming over with tons of hard currency in the middle of a war zone, going to one of the combatants -- in particular, one small faction of the combatants -- and saying, "OK, here's a ton of money, now go get us some slaves."

Basically funding the militia.

Exactly. And even if every one of those people was a slave and everything was on the up and up ... the devil is in the details.

You'd think that the hardest part would be freeing slaves. But once they're free, their lives are never easy. At one point in the Sudan section you say "free, but free to starve." What seems to you the best solution for helping former slaves deal with their new-found freedom?

Giving them some access to credit, healthcare, property rights and education. And psychological help.

In many of these far-off places where I was, the arbiters of law -- the people who set the rules -- are people who are benefiting from a slave economy. As long as that's the situation, you need to break the grip of those people over the system.

In your epilogue, you say, "George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president." However, you also criticize the Bush administration for focusing on sex trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of bondage.

The bar isn't very high. Only at the end of the Clinton years was there a recognition on the part of the executive branch that this was really an issue. But Bush deserves credit. He did more to free slaves than any president in modern history. But history doesn't grade on a curve on the subject of abolition. And he could have and should have done much more -- there's no question. The fact that there was such a narrow focus really hamstrung his efficacy on this.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has called trafficking "the dark underbelly of globalization."


Which presidential candidate -- Clinton, Obama or McCain -- do you think is most passionate about abolishing modern-day slavery?

Listen, I'm not going to give Obama a pass on this. It's not clear to me that he cares about modern-day slavery -- he hasn't said a word about it. And Hillary has, certainly in the last couple of years. Though not on the trail.

But I think it is a mistake to make this a campaign issue. I think it has to be a big piece of our American foreign policy platform. It needs to be fundamentally a central piece of any meaningful new American foreign policy.

And what about John McCain?

Well, he blurbed my book. John McCain is very close with John Miller, the former head of the TIP office, which is a good sign. But no, he hasn't been a leader on this.

One of the things I found hopeful about the book is that while it's important to make policy changes and create tough anti-slavery laws, NGOs and individuals clearly play a vital role in exposing slavery. People like Rampal in India (the activist who runs Sankalp) and the Amsterdam taxi driver who helps Kayta, a sex slave, buy her freedom. So the role of the individual is important.

It is, it's extremely important. If there's a critical thing from that U.S. chapter that I was trying to get across, it's that this doesn't have to be some kind of neo-McCarthyism where you are spying on your neighbors, but just be aware of what's going on in your community.

I talk about three things that individuals can and should do. The first is becoming conscious of the reality of slavery -- becoming more attuned to the signs of what may be a trafficking or slavery situation. A key part of that is getting educated about slavery. The second thing is pressing elected officials and candidates for office on what they're going to do about it -- what creative approaches they have for combatting modern-day slavery and ending it within a generation. The third things is supporting groups like Free the Slaves (Kevin Bales' group) and Anti-Slavery International.


Abolishing slavery is clearly an all-consuming issue, something that often drives people who are involved with it to burn out or go crazy or both. How have you kept your sanity during the four years of researching this book?

The question is really how these people that operate at the pointed end of the spear keep their sanity. And the people who run trafficking shelters in Romania -- who have weekly or monthly threats from traffickers -- how they keep their sanity. For me it was much easier. You go into these situations and certainly it stays with you. When you meet somebody like this young woman in the Bucharest brothel or Gonoo or the trafficker in Haiti who offered to sell me a child for $50.

What drove you to take on this project?

You could say that abolition is in my blood. My great-great-grandfather fought with the Union Army in the Siege of Petersburg [Va.]. His uncle was a rabble-rousing abolitionist in Connecticut. And I was raised Quaker. The Quakers were the heart of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, early 19th century.

Fast-forward to 1999. I read Kevin Bales' "Disposable People," which is an incredibly good, earnest take on modern-day slavery worldwide. Bales' estimate of total number of slaves was 27 million -- a staggering number. The one thing that I wanted to do was to put a human face on that: to tell the stories of the slaves, the slave masters and the slave traders. And to tell the stories of those who try to free them.



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Help Kentucky Divest for Darfur!

The Kentucky Senate will vote on a crucial divestment resolution THIS WEEK. We need your help to make sure the Kentucky Senate approves the resolution and passes it into law!

Call 800-372-7181 to send your senators a message TODAY!

24 states have already divested for Darfur and now it's Kentucky's turn!

Kentucky's House of Representatives has passed a resolution to withdraw public funds from companies that work with Sudan's genocidal government. The state Senate must now make the resolution legally binding so Kentucky can divest from genocide.

The Kentucky Senate will vote on this resolution THIS WEEK. Please call your state senator today to help Kentucky divest for Darfur!

Just follow these simple steps:

1. Call 800-372-7181 between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m.
2. Tell the staffer who answers the phone that you are calling to urge all senators to:
1. Support H.B. 703, Kentucky's targeted Sudan divestment resolution that the House of Representatives passed two weeks ago.
2. Strengthen the resolution to make it legally binding.
3. Click here to report your call back to us (this step is extremely important for organization purposes. Please don't skip it.)

Strong divestment legislation in Kentucky can create economic pressure on Khartoum to end the genocide. It will require Kentucky's pension funds to divest from companies that have a business relationship with the Sudanese government, fail to support Sudanese civilians, and fail to enact strong corporate governance policies regarding the genocide in Darfur.

Divestment strategies helped end apartheid in South Africa, and they can help end genocide in Sudan.

Make sure the Kentucky Senate meets our responsibility to act against genocide. Click here to send your message TODAY!

After you have sent your message, please click here to ask your friends and family to join you in urging their senators to help Kentucky divest for Darfur.

Thank you for your continued commitment to the people of Darfur.

Best regards,

Colleen Connors
Save Darfur Coalition

The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region. To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org.

Boingboing.net covers Tibet protests

Tibet: China blocks YouTube, protests spread, bloggers react
Posted by Xeni Jardin, March 16, 2008 9:50 AM | permalink

Here is a phonecam video of protests in Amdo, Tibet, over the weekend.

* According to Shanghaiist (and now, mainstream news outlets), YouTube was blocked in China over the weekend, likely because of content related to the flood of pro-Tibetan-sovereignty protests in Tibet and elsewhere:

International news channels such as CNN and BBC are also getting routinely blacked out. While we think this is a really poor way to deal with all the shit that's going on, we have been there many, many times, and survived. Time to turn on your VPN again, people! An

* John Kennedy at Global Voices confirms the YouTube block:

As Tibet transitioned into total lockdown and videos of the violent situation proliferated on YouTube, people began noticing Saturday afternoon in China that the video-sharing website could not be accessed. Tech blogger Rick Martin on the CNET Asia Little Red Blog has done some tests which confirm what many have assumed.

* Rebecca McKinnon at Global Voices has an excellent roundup of reactions in the Chinese blogosphere:

For those living in the West who didn't realize that there's little sympathy for Tibet independence among ethnic Chinese in the PRC, this blog post on Global Voices will be a shocker. John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us... where have we heard this before? Reuters has a roundup on the Washington Post that begins: "a look at Chinese blogs reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed against Tibetans and the West." (...)

"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here, here, and here, specifically. Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding. Here is his challenge to all of us...

* On Friday, protest in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, erupted into violence when police, army troops, and ethnic Tibetan demonstrators clashed. Some accounts place the death toll at 30, some at 100, some at 300. It's hard to separate rumor from truthful first-hand account, and hard to know exactly how many have been killed or injured, because communication in the region is so difficult. Foreign journalists are not allowed in, unaccompanied by official escorts. Internet and phone communications are routinely blocked by Chinese authorities when unrest occurs; some blogging tourists in Lhasa wanting to upload photos of what they witnessed have reported the presence of authorities inside 'net cafes. Pro-Tibetan-sovereignty sites like TCHRD, SFT, and Phayul are posting first-person accounts online. Some of those reports are difficult to independently confirm, given the circumstances. The website of the Central Tibetan Administration (part of the government in exile, led by the Dalai Lama, based in India) posts this update.

* The unrest spread this weekend to regions outside Lhasa: police and protesters also clashed in China's Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, and Gansu province, all of which have large ethnic Tibetan populations. On Saturday...

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital.

* China's government has declared a "people's war" against the Tibetan independence movement, in "propaganda and security" measures, and has implemented what amounts to martial law in Lhasa.

"Fight a people's war to oppose separatism and protect stability ... expose and condemn the malicious actions of these forces and expose the hideous face of the Dalai clique to broad daylight," senior regional and security officials announced after a meeting, according to the official Tibet Daily on Sunday.

* China's governor in Tibet promises harsh consequences for protest participants who do not turn themselves in by Tuesday.

* Speaking to reporters today in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile, the Dalai Lama called for an international inquiry into the current human rights conditions in Tibet.

''Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some kind of cultural genocide is taking place,'' said the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. He was referring to China's policy of encouraging the ethnic Han majority to migrate to Tibet, restrictions on Buddhist temples and re-education programs for monks.

* George Bush removed China from a human rights blacklist just three days before the bloodshed in Lhasa.

UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Adam writes,

I am visiting Beijing on business, and staying at a hotel that caters to Westerners. There have been reports that China was loosening controls on the media ahead of the Olympic games, in order to give visitors the impression that the media is unrestricted, but that is not the case in the last day.

While watching CNN in my hotel room, the station goes dark during the top-of-the-hour news flash on the riots, then returns when the synopsis of "what's to come" is given about other stories, and then goes dark again while the coverage switches to Lhasa.

Coverage returns with the anchor asking users to send in their first-hand reports to ireport.com, after all mention of the incident is over. Same results for BBC as well.

The China Daily newspaper I grabbed from the lounge has a small article on the bottom of the front page, titled "Dalai Lama behind sabotage", and states that his "clique" has "organized, premeditated, and masterminded" the beatings, looting, and arson, which "has aroused the indignation of, and is strongly condemned by, the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet."

* Reports estimate that 20,000 Chinese troops have now been deployed to Lhasa (thanks, Christal).

* UPDATE 2 (8pm PT Sunday March 16): BB reader Nick Dobson says,

Besides Youtube, it appears The Guardian and Boingboing have been added to the blocked list in China. ([I'm in] Suzhou, Jiangsu, China)

Protests in Tibet

The above video is a rare recording of a protest in Tibet against Chinese rule, taken by a tourist. Check out Students for a Free Tibet for more information.

A Chance to Reclaim Moral Leadership: Vetoed

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030800304.html?hpid=topnews

Bush today vetoed a bill that would have explicitly banned the torture technique of waterboarding. I am disgusted and worry about our nation's moral leadership. America grew into a world leader, inspiring the world with our ideals. Human dignity is a chief component of American ideology. We cannot sacrifice an ideal to defend it.

We can redeem our government if we, as a nation, recognize the hypocrisy in the government's actions. We can restore out integrity. Past presidents have done so, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Upon hearing about abuses; the use of waterboarding, actually; Roosevelt investigated, and made sure that those responsible were punished so that others would know that human rights abuses are unacceptable. (see http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6647.html)

A very poignant line in the Washington Post, article, is actually about the security dangers of using such techniques:

"Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about. 'If they think these methods work, they're woefully misinformed,"'Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. 'Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.'"

I worry for our country. Let me end with a Lincoln quote that is supported by Lt. Gen. Soyster's argument:

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Students Craft Internships to Fit Interests

Today's Wall Street Journal featured the HGHR Center's Student Advisory Board member Ritika Puri. Ritika actually was offered an AnneMerie Donoghue Fellowship grant for this internship but opted to take the McKenna International instead (she won both) so that more people could receive funding from the Center for human rights internships. Congratulations on the article, Ritika, and on creating such an amazing internship!


Job Description? Some Applicants Write Their Own
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY

From The Wall Street Journal

Heather Day's ideal summer internship didn't exist. So she created it herself.

A junior at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., Ms. Day wanted to combine her love for hip-hop music with her interest in helping children. After being unable to find a suitable program, she sent out cover letters and résumés to eight nonprofit art-education groups in New York, Washington and Atlanta, none of which had a formal internship program.

Art Start, a New York nonprofit that educates disadvantaged children about the arts, agreed to take her on as an intern this summer. In addition to planning a fund-raiser and creating a curriculum for the nonprofit's fall session of classes, she will be running a monthlong hip-hop workshop for children.

Ritika Puri interned at Adharshila, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that offers health and education services for residents of a local slum.

"Hip hop is a great way to relate to a lot of people," says Ms. Day, an American studies major with a minor in human development. Although the internship is unpaid, Connecticut College is giving Ms. Day, 20 years old, a $3,000 stipend to help cover her living expenses.

Special Interests

With education growing more specialized, students are increasingly looking for internships that allow them to focus on their specific areas of study. When those opportunities aren't available, they are approaching companies and nonprofits to create their own internships, colleges and universities say.

The option "appeals to almost any liberal-arts student who isn't interested in going the business route because gaining experience in the field that you are interested in is challenging, often," says Beth Ricca, associate director of career services and director of internships and volunteer programs at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal-arts college in Claremont, Calif.

The trend comes at a time when employers are increasingly looking for new hires with internship experience. Often, a summer job can turn into a full-time one. Employers hired 47% of their interns from the class of 2006, up from 36% in 2000, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey released in June. On average, 62% of college hires have had some internship experience in the past, according to the survey.

But convincing an employer to create an internship can be difficult -- especially for students with focused majors and interests. Stew Peckham, director of career development at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, says students often submit proposals to employers stating goals and specific areas of interest. "If the student outlines that a bit, it could get them further along," he says.

While some students sit down with an employer and design a set of tasks, the internship often evolves on its own. Last summer, Ritika Puri, a 21-year-old junior and literature major at Claremont McKenna, wanted an internship related to social and economic development in India. She was particularly interested in exploring the relationship between socioeconomic status and access to education and health-care facilities. Rather than look for an established internship, "I was really interested in designing my own," says Ms. Puri.

Ms. Puri contacted Adharshila, an organization in New Delhi that assists about 400 residents in a local slum, through a family friend. She was hired to assess Adharshila's existing programs and help choose new initiatives for the organization. She went door-to-door to ask residents what services they needed the most. People said they wanted better access to health care and better tutoring services for children, she says. She obtained a $500 donation, which she used to buy school supplies for 100 children. She also helped start a health center, which receives about 20 patients a day. "My role just sort of grew while on the job," she says.

The process of creating an internship comes with challenges, though. For instance, targeting employers willing to offer specialized internships can be tough. Frannie Noble, 22, a government major at Connecticut College, wanted to find a group that would allow her to research children's rights in Africa. She sent out 20 cover letters and résumés to nonprofits in Mali and Senegal. None responded. Then, she went to Mali during the spring semester last year as part of a study-abroad program and visited some of the groups in person, trying to spark their interest.

Working in Mali

In April, the Coalition of African NGOs Working with Children invited her in for an interview and offered her a position for the summer. As part of her internship, she visited nonprofits to gather information about the biggest challenges to children's rights in Mali, including flaws in the education system, child trafficking and child labor. At the end of the internship, she submitted a research paper on her findings.

Finding funding can be difficult because it is far less likely these internships will pay. Some schools provide financial assistance, albeit to only a handful of students. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., provide funding for select students doing unpaid internships. Individual grants are usually about $2,000 but can range up to $6,000, depending on the student's financial need.

Colleges that offer grants require students to submit proposals indicating what they hope to gain out of the internship and how it relates to their majors and career goals. The schools also help students design their programs and locate companies and groups.

Corporate Prospects

While many of the internships involve nonprofits or small companies, some students have pitched internships to larger employers -- even if their interests are unrelated to the company's core business. David Fine, who graduated last year from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., with a degree in social policy, "was pretty dead-set" on creating an internship in corporate philanthropy the summer before his senior year. Mr. Fine, 23, proposed an internship to companies in the Bay Area -- such as Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- that listed charitable initiatives on their Web sites. He told employers he wanted to learn how the private sector could address social issues.

He was hired at San Francisco natural-gas and electric utility company Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a subsidiary of PG&E Corp. His task was to restructure the company's employee-volunteer program. He also helped set up an internal site where employees could post volunteer opportunities and worked on a company initiative to help fund the creation of parks in the Bay Area. He submitted a research paper to his school at the end of the summer and received course credit for the internship.

Creating an internship tailored to his interests made him better equipped to find a full-time job in the same field, he says. Mr. Fine now works at the Center for Companies That Care, a Chicago nonprofit that helps businesses become socially responsible. "It helped me realize that this is a feasible interest to pursue and a feasible career field," he says."

Good New: Karlo Will Live

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 6, 2008
From The New York Times

NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan

The farm families living in these rocky hills in central Sudan confront every disease imaginable, from leprosy to malaria, and perhaps one-quarter of children die by the age of five.

Yet this is a “good news” column. Karlo will live.

The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of five has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history — compared with 20 million annually in 1960 — Unicef noted in a report last month, “Child Survival.” Now the goal is to cut the death toll to four million by 2015.

Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.

To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.

One of the lives saved this year seems to be that of Karlo, an 8-month-old baby boy who lives in a thatch-roof hut here. His older brother, Kuti, had died a few days before I arrived: Kuti was taken to the hospital and tested positive for malaria, but the doctor believed that he probably died from meningitis.

Then Karlo fell sick, and his mother was frantic at the thought that he would die as well. The father, Bolus Abdullah, was more fatalistic.

“Many children die here,” Mr. Bolus explained to me as volunteers with an American aid group, Samaritan’s Purse, drove the family to the nearest hospital over a fantastically rutted road. “But if that’s the will of God, then there’s nothing we can do.”

Yet there are things we can do — and that brings us to the American presidential campaign.

African children like Karlo may actually have more at stake in the outcome of the presidential election than children in the United States. Just imagine if the next president were to wage a serious war on malaria. At a tiny fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq (or a war on Iran!) such a campaign would save millions of lives and be a huge boost to African economies whose productivity is sapped by diseases.

The hospital to which we took Karlo is run by an aid group, German Emergency Doctors, and is run by a husband-wife team of physicians, Karl Eiter and Gabi Kortmann. The hospital, whose “wards” are thatch-roof huts with no electricity, is perched on a rural mountainside to protect it from aerial bombings by the Sudanese government. (Sudan’s main involvement in health care in contested areas like this has been to strafe hospitals.)

Dr. Eiter ordered a blood test for Karlo, and it came back positive for malaria. He gave Karlo a medication that is almost always effective against malaria here, artemisinin combination therapy, costing just 50 cents for an entire course of treatment.

Saving children’s lives in rural Africa or Asia, where millions die of ailments as simple as diarrhea, pneumonia or measles, is achingly simple and inexpensive. The starting point is vaccinations and basic sanitation.

“We never have all the vaccines that are required,” Dr. Eiter said.

For years, the rationale for opposing foreign assistance has been that it doesn’t work. It’s true that humanitarian aid is devilishly difficult to get right, money is squandered and the impact of aid is often oversold.

But President Bush’s record underscores that other policies are difficult to get right as well: Iraq is a mess, and social security reform and immigration reform both failed. Mr. Bush’s greatest single accomplishment is that his AIDS program in Africa is saving millions of lives.

That makes it all the more stunning that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget for 2009 cuts U.S. funding for child and maternal health programs around the world by nearly 18 percent.

Fortunately, all the candidates are saying the right things about malaria, AIDS and support for education in Africa (although John McCain is fuzzier about commitments). You can compare the candidates’ positions on global humanitarian issues at www.onevote08.org.

Voters should remember this: A president may or may not be able to improve schools or protect manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but a president probably could help wipe out malaria. Compared with other challenges a president faces, saving a million children’s lives a year is the low-hanging fruit.

Karlo, bouncing in his mother’s lap, underscores the hope. With the medicine, he recovered quickly and was sent home from the hospital after a few days. The news here is simple and giddy ... he’s alive!

China and Human Rights Symposium Starts Today!

CHINA AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A SYMPOSIUM

Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children, and the Kravis Leadership Institute

To be held at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College

Thursday, March 6, 2008

3:00–4:45 pm: China, Economics, and Human Rights
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights

William Ascher, Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics, Claremont McKenna College; How So-Called "Economic Rights" Have Infringed upon Political and Human Rights
Richard Burdekin, Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College; Financial Market Fluctuations and Chinese Government Policy Shifts
Jerry Fowler, Executive Director, Save Darfur Coalition; China and Darfur
Jonathan Petropoulos, John V. Croul Professor of European History and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator

Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center for U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society; former Dean (1996–2006), Graduate School of Journalism, U.C. Berkeley; author, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000) and Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation ofEntrepreneurs, Dissidents, Technocrats, and Bohemians Grasp for Power in China (1995); "The Global Environmental Consequences of China's "Right" to Development." Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies

Friday, March 7, 2008

9:00–10:30 am: China: State, Human Rights, and the Beijing Olympics
Panel sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies

Richard Baum, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles; Human Rights and the Beijing Olympics
Stanley Rosen, Professor of Political Science and Director of the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California; Changing State-Society Relations and the Rights of Chinese Citizens
Chae-Jin Lee, BankAmerica Professor of Pacific Basin Studies and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator

10:30–10:45 am: Coffee break

10:45 am–12:15 pm: Intellectual Life and Politics in Contemporary China
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies

Gao ErTai, Writer/Painter/Art Critic; The Artist in Chinese Society
Wang Chaohua, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Civil Rights and Human Rights: Before and After Tiananmen
Lindsay Waters, Executive Director for Humanities, Harvard University Press; Confucianism, Humanism, and Democracy
Gloria Davies, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University; Affirming the Human in Chinese Intellectual Discourse
Kang Zhengguo, Senior lector, East Asian languages and literature, Yale University
Theodore Huters, Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA; Co-moderator
Robert Faggen, Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Co-moderator

12:15–1:30 pm: Lunch

1:30–3:00 pm: Society and Human Rights I
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights and the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children

Melinda Herrold-Menzies, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Pitzer College; Human Rights and Nature Preserves in China
Theresa Harris, Director, International Justice Project at the World Organization for Human Rights; China and the Internet
Susan Greenhalgh, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Irvine; China's "One Child" Policy
Sherylle Tan, Associate Director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator

3:15–4:45 pm: Society and Human Rights II
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies

Dai Qing, Journalist/Activist; The Three Gorges Dam and Human Survival
Han Dongfang, Workers' Rights Activist; Labor Movements in China
Dorothy Solinger, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine; The Right to Livelihood: Is It Being Met?
Thomas Bernstein, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University; Peasants, Human Rights, and Abusive Officials
Arthur Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator

Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:

Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science; director, John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University; coauthor, Mao's Last Revolution (2006) and editor, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (1997); "Political Reform: Past, Present—Future?" Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies