
© Mimi Chakarova"They brought me to a group of 12 men, kept me there for four days, taking turns," said Maia, who was trafficked to Moscow at 18 - Moldova, 2005
Sometimes I wonder if I would do it again.
That's the funny thing about life. Experience comes in random, sporadic servings. It's only years later that the story takes shape.
I didn't intend to spend more than a year covering human trafficking. It ended up taking a decade. I didn't intend on reporting in more than two countries. So, how did I end up in nine?
Before my trips, my mum used to ask: "It took us so many years to get out of poverty, why do you keep returning there?" I would sit in her kitchen and the only answer that would come to mind was: "It's so damn familiar."
I can say the same about the Balkans. Each time the plane landed, I was home. It could have been Turkey, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria (my birth country), or Macedonia - I wasn't an outsider. I understood the culture, the rawness of our ways, the dark humour of our days.
Comment: From robots to artificial intelligence and software to read your mind, the Pentagon and DARPA are busy creating ways to reduce the population to little more than automatons and prisoners in a high-tech worldwide control grid.
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