Past articles

I've been working on anti-trafficking for 20 years. Despite some hard-won gains, the situation is getting rapidly worse now. My own specialty is bringing together anti-trafficking with human rights work. I feel that if we're going to tackle this and win we have to find a way to bring all the people working on this issue together. I believe that a human rights framework would help us analyze, strategize and link the various aspects of the complex issue of trafficking together.

I came to the U.S. in the early 1980s to study at Mt. Holyoke College. It was an exhilarating time where I learned about feminism and gave voice to all the struggles I had growing up in a patriarchal extended family in India. One of the earliest issues that I became involved with was trafficking in women - at a time when few were aware of the scale and dimensions of the problem.

Every time I begin a new project, unlike many screenwriters, my problem is not how to start that first page, but rather, when to stop researching a story. For someone who grew up in communist Poland, reading was the only way to take virtual trips, since travel outside the communist block was almost impossible. But when I immigrated to America and became a writer, I realized that all this free access to any publication imaginable could be quite dangerous — I became a research junkie.

I read in the Friday, September 09, 2005 edition of USA Today that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour addressed about 100 lawmakers at the Capitol in Jackson. He said, "I am committed to going beyond recovering and rebuilding. I am committed to our having a renaissance on the Gulf Coast." He went on to say that much infrastructure is destroyed in south Mississippi-highways, bridges, rail lines and water and sewer systems.

Hmmm...what does renaissance mean? The dictionary says rebirth, new start, resurgence, reawakening; its antonym is decline.