An overwhelming experience

Benjamin brought a group of young people from Brazil to Italy to experience working with an OM anti-trafficking team. After a short training, the group went out in the street to pray for the area and the people who have been trafficked or are at risk of being trafficked. The group of young people prepared typical Brazilian foods to share with people on the street during this time. As Benjamin shares, it was an amazing experience.

My name is Benjamim Di Lullo, and I work with Youth in Mission in Brazil. I had an absolutely unforgettable week with the OM anti-trafficking team. The team, which is aimed at reaching people in prostitution in the province of Pisa, welcomed with open arms my desire to address the delicate issue of human trafficking with the group of mission workers at the foundation of Youth in Mission in Cuiabà, the city in which I work.  

During the last semester, my wife and I were among the managers of a training course for young people eager to live an experience missions. Already in the organisational phases of the school, we began to dream of the opportunity to bring the group to Italy to serve the Italian church and face some evangelistic challenges. 

My wife, the four students, and I arrived at the Acquaviva Church in San Romano, where the OM team began preparing us for the outing that awaited us.

We thought we were ready 

I have to be honest: we had been waiting for this training for months. We thought we were emotionally ready and already had the right cards to deal with a topic that we knew to be delicate... but we had no idea what was waiting for us.  

For hours, the Lord challenged our conception of humanity, sin, sexuality, parenting, culture and love. For hours God destroyed in us mental barriers that prevented us from looking at His holy and immense pain for His little girls who are sold as objects and made sex slaves to be handled, violated and thrown into the largest markets on the globe. Our eyes were opened to the greatest of catastrophes, which is realised before us, daily, slow, constant and terrible as the descent of an avalanche. Thousands of men, women and children are slaves to a rotten system and self-proclaimed lies that deny their own human dignity. Money, power and perversion in the sunlight govern the heart of man on the entire surface of the earth.  

And we...what have we done? What did the Church of Christ Jesus do? What have I done but ignore and let go, or even worse, judge those women who sell their bodies in exchange for money?  

And it was precisely in that sense of personal shame that Jesus made Himself present before me. I had certainly done little to fight the injustice of trafficking, but He had not. He, on the contrary, acted! Jesus gave His life to redeem those who alone could not do it. Going so far as to transform the lives of slaves and slaveholders, illuminating even the deepest darkness with the light of His grace. And He also acted through His Church, presenting Himself as the only and true hope for a world that would otherwise be deprived of it.  

Proclaiming the love of Christ 

One of the girls on the team commented: “He made me look inside me and see that there were judgments, preconceptions, pride and much more on which He wanted to work to make me His disciple and a means of proclaiming His love.”  

With this burden, immensely heavy, yet at the same time very light because it rests on the shoulders of the Saviour, we met and chatted with some Brazilian transgenders on the Pisan streets. We heard their stories and talked about their dreams in Portuguese. We ate the specialities of their land together. We have witnessed Jesus and have communicated His infinite Love.

For more information about OM's anti-trafficking ministry in Italy, visit this page (in Italian).