SALON

Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013 3:45 PM UTC

Dickey in Mumbai to help end sexual exploitation

By

Topics: From the Wires,

R.A. Dickey said the pictures and literature couldn’t have prepared him for the young boy who approached him last week on one of the squalid streets of Mumbai’s red-light district.

The boy was maybe 3 years old, 4 at best. He had no pants on. His body was covered with open sores.

“He was playing amongst the open sewage and filth with rats as big as dogs. Unsupervised,” the Toronto Blue Jays’ new knuckleballer told The Canadian Press on a conference call Tuesday from India’s most populous city. “You see these images and pictures that just don’t seem like they should exist. And you hope that it’s the only one … but that’s what’s representative, these lives that just don’t have a voice.”

The 38-year-old is in Mumbai to work with Bombay Teen Challenge, a Christian organization that has rescued women and children from sex trafficking for the past 23 years.

It’s a cause that Dickey says speaks to his own narrative. He wrote about being sexually abused as a child in his autobiography “Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball.”

“It’s authentic to me because of my past experience, also I have a sentimentality to it because the girls that I’ve seen firsthand in the streets, these 19-, 20-, 21-year-old girls. You have to look beyond that and see at one point they were daughters themselves, and having two daughters … that just for me was so compelling.”

He made the trip with his daughters, 11-year-old Gabriel and 9-year-old Lila.

“I want to give my children a heart for humanity,” Dickey said. “The only way to really do that is to get them outside of the bubble that they live in, and expose them in very measured ways to what real life is to a lot of people. They’ve responded beautifully.”

The 2012 NL Cy Young winner said it’s been “a roller-coaster” visit, from the visceral red-light images of women in doorways and the cages where they keep them when they’re first trafficked.

But he also saw hope.

Dickey and his daughters stayed at Ashagram, a rehabilitation campus outside Mumbai that’s home to 300 women and children. They were the “most hopeful days” of the trip. They played cricket and sang songs with the children, many of whom are HIV positive.

“Those are the miracles, the 300 lives in Ashagram, those are 300 living miracles,” Dickey said. “Sure (my daughters) heard about the wickedness and the darkness, but they got to actually see the redemption, so their response has been really positive. This is a seminal trip for them.”

Dickey, who speaks openly with his daughters about his own sexual abuse, helped celebrate the opening of a clinic in the midst of Mumbai’s red-light district. He helped pay for the clinic, raising over $100,000 by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro last winter.

“The facility is like a beacon of light in the middle of a swamp,” he said.

BTC’s Thomason Varghese said the organization was blessed by Dickey’s presence.

“But we think we’ve been even more blessed by his daughters,” Varghese said. “Just to see innocent girls loving our girls and playing with them with no inhibitions, it’s just been a real joy for us to see and experience. There are friendships that have come through this despite how different their backgrounds are.

“Today the girls were in our feeding truck serving food to those who are coming from the street, just watching that was a sight to see.”

While estimates of sex trafficking in India vary, most studies put the number at more than a million children involved in the country’s sex trade.

Dickey was asked how can one measure success in the face of such grim statistics.

“If the organization rescues one human life from that hell, then it’s done its job in some way,” Dickey said. “You’re talking over the last 23 years over 1,000 lives being rescued, given a second chance to have a life, rescuing children, people who were left for dead on doorsteps of these brothels. . .

“The women who had been trafficked into prostitution, dying in hospitals with their children by their bed, here’s the Bombay Teen Challenge with a relationship in place to be able to take in and care for these children.

“How do you measure success? I think it’s one life at a time.”

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations