The Current24:06My Dad Ward: Freeing women from trafficking
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Evelyn Zaccheus spoke in a whisper as she recorded the voice note. That’s because she was describing her slavery ordeal from inside her trafficker’s home in the Gulf country of Oman.
After she hit send, her missive landed with a ping on the phone of Ward Reddick, a Vancouver resident she knew only through the kind-hearted voice memos he sent in reply.
Those WhatsApp exchanges with Reddick had become her lifeline.
His was one of the only voices the Liberian woman had heard for about a year, as Zaccheus had been passed between three homes in the Omani capital, Muscat. She worked roughly 20-hour days in domestic servitude, cleaning nine bedrooms and eight bathrooms every day.
Through those voice messages, Zaccheus told Reddick that her so-called employers kept her locked inside the house, where she was not allowed visitors. She eventually needed medical treatment, because her feet had become so swollen she could barely stand and the pain in her back was excruciating. But she said the traffickers wouldn’t allow her to seek help.
Strange men in the house would also try to push open her bedroom door when she was changing her clothes, so Zaccheus lived in constant fear.
Her case illustrates the plight of millions of people around the world who are victims of human trafficking, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In July, the organization said conflict, climate-related disasters and economic inequality are pushing more people into the hands of migrant smugglers and human traffickers.
Additionally, the International Organization for Migration said 2023 was the deadliest year on record for migrants.
Zaccheus, 36, eventually got free in April 2023, making her one of more than 200 women from sub-Saharan Africa who Reddick has helped escape trafficking in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Dubai and India.
Zaccheus and Reddick exchanged more than 700 voice messages over 167 days.
“When they become free for the first time, I just want to hear them send an audio message that I can tell in their voice that they’re no longer a slave,” said Reddick in an interview for the CBC Radio documentary My Dad Ward. “That’s the payday, the wonderful moment. That’s magical.”
Discovering a ‘most horrific world’
For five years, the former investment advisor operated as a volunteer one-man anti-trafficking agency from his living room. He says his wife, Lydia, a Ugandan Canadian, helped with translation.
In July 2022, Reddick made his work official, taking a position as a repatriation co-ordinator with Rain Collective, an NGO that helps trafficked women get home.
Reddick got into this work by accident. For seven years, he ran a small jewelry export business in Uganda, returning to B.C. in 2015. The following year, he said, a friend of a former employee was trafficked, and he felt compelled to help. One case led to the next, typically by word of mouth.
Reddick said that as he learned more about how the traffickers operated, he figured out ways to help the women. Plotting with the victims almost exclusively by voice notes and texts, Reddick and the women would subtly pressure recruiters to terminate contracts or file complaints with labour ministries. Sometimes, knowing there was someone willing to listen was all the women needed to survive until they found a way out.
Nowadays, Reddick works on around a dozen cases a week. The names of the women whose cases he is currently handling line a whiteboard in his kitchen.
“I just discovered this most horrific world and set of circumstances that I’d ever run into personally,” he said.
Zaccheus was trafficked from Liberia in November 2021 to work as a maid in a large house in Muscat, Oman. Six men lived in the house.
In WhatsApp voice notes — which CBC has heard — she told Reddick these men sexually harassed and propositioned her, and that she recorded the interactions through her bedroom door.
I was shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ But no one could hear me.– Evelyn Zaccheus
One of the recordings provided to CBC had a man’s voice with a heavy accent, saying in English, “I’m coming with you, your room, sleeping together.” There was no lock on her door, no way to keep him out.
Zaccheus said she kept telling the men she wasn’t interested, and eventually each would wander off. On another occasion, she was cleaning the bathroom when one of her harassers came in and undressed.
“I was shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ But no one could hear me,” she said in a voice note.
Zaccheus managed to get away, but said she was terrified one of the men living there would rape or kill her.
The economics
Liberia has been on the U.S. State Department’s human trafficking watch list for years. However, the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic mean poverty-stricken victims have become even easier prey for traffickers.
Before she left, Zaccheus sold beans, flour and other dry goods at a market stall in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. She had wanted to keep her nine-year-old son Blessing in school, but she needed more money for the fees. She took a loan from friends to start the business, but only made the equivalent of $80 Cdn a week.
CBC met Zaccheus in Monrovia in July 2023, three months after she returned home. During the interview, she explained that in 2021, she met a woman advertising well-paid jobs in Oman who told her she could make $500 US ($679 Cdn) a month. So Zaccheus decided to go.
But after six months, she hadn’t been paid anything. Zaccheus worked at least 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and her health was deteriorating.
Police lay charges against seven people for their part in a human trafficking ring after a tip from a single worker. Police allege the accused brought 64 people into Canada, for cheap labour, where they were forced to live and work in deplorable conditions.
CBC spoke with Uganda-based recruitment agent Francis Kereba, who said he earns up to $5,000 a month from trafficking women — 25 times the average salary in Liberia.
Christian Mayanja, a former agent, told CBC he used to recruit workers from Uganda to work in Saudi Arabia, and admitted he knew the women he sent overseas were at risk of being exploited and abused.
“The only business [traffickers] know is numbers. The more numbers, the more commission and the more payment,” said Mayanja. “Very few of them … will factor in the concept that as much as we try to sell this commodity, this product, once these people buy it on that side there, there’s a chance of [the trafficked individuals] being tortured.”
When she first arrived in Oman, Zaccheus was taken to a so-called recruitment office in Muscat, where she lived for a while. She later told Reddick that even though things were awful with her “employers,” she was most terrified of going back to the recruitment office.
According to the testimonies of more than a dozen survivors CBC has interviewed, the recruitment agents at these offices regularly starve the women as an incentive to accept abusive work placements where they can, theoretically, make money to eat. While they wait, the women are sometimes beaten, shackled and tortured.
“If it calls for them to put me on the street, then put me on the street, but I’m not going back to that office. Because if I go back to that office, I will die,” Zaccheus said in one voice note to Reddick.
A breaking point
In 2022, after months of struggling to keep up with her cleaning duties, and with her health continuing to deteriorate, Zaccheus’s situation reached a breaking point. Her employer refused to take her to a hospital. Instead, he sent her back to the recruitment office.
Fifteen women were already there, locked up and sleeping on the floor. Some were wounded.
“[The women] were offered the opportunity to at least do day work and go out, and that would earn them a meal. But if you were too sick to work, you starved,” said Reddick.
She’d been there 18 months and they had made money from her by cheating her over that time.– Ward Reddick
From the recruitment office, Zaccheus was sent out on a few more work stints where she wasn’t paid, and a final one where she earned 80 Omani rial ($288 Cdn) each month for three months. She says she only earned 240 Omani rial ($864 Cdn) in total during her entire 17 months in Oman.
CBC Radio requested comment from the Omani Ministry of Labour about human trafficking in the country, but has not received a response.
Getting the women out
Reddick says he uses several strategies to free the victims. The main one is to get the traffickers to drop the penalties the women must pay to be released from their contracts and allowed to go home. That might mean coaching the woman to ask at just the right moment, or subtly suggesting to the traffickers that someone knows about her predicament.
Reddick has also reported mistreatment to labour ministries in Oman and other countries. Officials sometimes pressure traffickers to return travel documents so the women can go home. But by refusing to cover the costs of the women’s flights home, traffickers have another way of keeping them there. So Reddick raised funds to cover the costs, before joining Rain Collective, which now pays for them.
When Zaccheus returned to the recruitment office for the last time in early 2023, it appeared to be closing down. But the traffickers held her passport and — according to the contract she signed �— were her legal guardians. She needed them to terminate her “employment.”
“There wasn’t much resistance to let her go at that point,” said Reddick. “She’d been there 18 months and they had made money from her by cheating her over that time.”
After about a week, her traffickers told Zaccheus she could go — if she had money for a plane ticket. Reddick secured the funds through Rain Collective.
In one of the last messages she sent to Reddick before making her way home, Zaccheus thanked him for making her feel like she counted among the living.
“You just make me feel like I still exist … Just yesterday, I felt like I was dead.”