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Sitting across the table from Ryan Dalton proved to be weird ----amazingly, incredibly, awesomely weird. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that this was the same curly haired, quirky kid that sat in my 7th grade English Grammar class almost a dozen years ago. The same kid I had dubbed ‘Wretched” because he was mystified by that word on a vocabulary quiz and who joyfully answered to that name even after his graduation from ECS in 2005 just told me that God had punched him in the face at Barnes and Noble one day a few years earlier with the book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery and that he was now actively fighting human trafficking. Then in the very next breath he starts talking about “trekking Bibles” in NEPAL and meeting a human trafficker!!
Honestly, at this point I was too stupefied to care about directly quoting him. I just wanted to hear his story. So, the conversation went very much like this:
“Wayyyy wayyy wayyy WAIT a minute! You do what? You were where? Doing what? With whom? Wait, wait, wait you gotta start this over” I stammered trying to fathom what he had just said.
“OK, well I am walking through Barnes and Noble one day and just happen to glance at the title of this book called: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. I picked it up and started reading, and it rocked my world. I could not believe that a relic from history like human slavery was very much alive not just in the third world but in the US.”
According to Dalton, the next several months found him digging into every available resource out there on the topic of human trafficking and modern slavery which led to him making the topic the focus of his undergraduate thesis. God had lit a fire under Ryan Dalton with a book and then he fanned it into flame in a city square in Nepal where he encountered the real thing.
“Seven guys and I from First Evan were trekking Bibles in Nepal when this guy comes up to me in a town square and asks me if I wanted some drugs,” begins Dalton with this part of the story.
“Wait, wait, wait, trekking Bibles?” I ask.
“Yeah, you stuff a couple of Bibles into your pack and then hike them into different parts of the country,” he says.
“Well is that legal in Nepal?” I ask.
“Yeah but the Maoist have a lot of influence there and can make things tough on you,” he casually replies.
In my head I am still wrestling with the concept that a kid I taught English Grammar 12 years ago in 7th grade is traveling to NEPAL!!, and smuggling Bibles to people in remote areas and is now about to tell me of his encounter with a sex trafficker.
“So, this runner asks if I want drugs, and I tell him no. And then he asks me about girls. He wants to know if I would like some girls. At this point, I told our college minister that I really felt like God was showing me the reality of this and I wanted to go wherever this was going to lead. He said go, so me and a translator follow this guy down all these allies and back streets until we arrive at this massage parlor.”
He goes on to tell of young girls between the ages of 12 -22 being paraded out for him and the translator to select. They choose two and leave with them and duck into a café on a side street. They buy them a meal and listen to their story, give them some money for their own and give them contact information for people who might be able to help them escape the sex slavery they are trapped in. They ultimately had to leave the girls because the pimp discovered them in the restaurant.
“After that incident the world just looked like a different place. Nothing was the same when I got home. I had been at a crossroads when I left for Nepal. After getting my degree in Philosophy and International Relations, I was trying to decide between law school and the military. When I came back, all I could think about was how I could work to end the slave trade. Now I am in my second year of law school at the University of Memphis and am really involved in Operation Broken Silence.”
I asked Ryan if this war on human trafficking was his calling. He assured me that it was but that he had only recently become comfortable with the idea.
“Sometime I get so tired of the darkness and misery I see in this battle. Sometimes I just want to enjoy beauty and truth, but then I remember what one of the staff at Lebree told me: Select a career based on your response to the brokenness in the world. I do this because Jesus set me free, and he has stirred in my heart the desire to set others free”
Frankly the whole conversation left me dumbfounded. Here was a young man I had known as a bumbling adolescent in middle school and yet here he was now, sitting across from me with grim faced determination, arguably impacting the world in the name of Christ from one end of the globe to the other. I sat in my seat watching him finish off his hot chocolate thinking God is so cool and selfishly thinking that 7th grade grammar must have played some small part in this story.
Of course, it is just like God to take sparks from a fire he started in Nepal and scatter them all the way to a summer camp in Arkansas/Missouri? (fact check). Last summer that’s where Robinson Littrell, a senior this year at ECS, first heard about human trafficking and where God first stirred his heart to take action.
“I was completely ignorant of the concept of human trafficking, and when I heard a guy speak on the subject at Kanakuk last summer, God just grabbed my heart and left me crying on the floor. I came home from camp determined to get involved somehow,” recounts Littrell.
No surprise that Robinson’s research into human trafficking lead him right to Ryan Dalton and Operation Broken Silence. In just a few short months, Robinson has become a MOVE Ambassador for OBS and has initiated his own organization called Mission: Abolition under the umbrella of Operation Broken Silence and has a growing number of ECS students meeting and brainstorming and planning ways to combat modern slavery. His efforts have impacted groups at several area schools and show promise of impacting even more.
The work of Ryan and Robinson has global implications and rings true to the words of Luke 4:18 “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoner ... to release the oppressed…” and leaves me in stunned awe of God’s genius.
Ryan Dalton is the Director of Anti-trafficking Operations for Operation Broken Silence and can be reached at ryan@operationbrokensilence.org
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