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We all need to know that trafficking is going on all around us.

Lord Jesus, have mercy and show us who is around us that we can speak up for.

My husband drives through Newark everyday and goes to school one town away from East Orange.

Woman describes journey from Africa into human bondage

Wednesday, September 16, 2009- The Star Ledger

Joe Ryan - Star Ledger Staff

Vida Anagblah said she was a teenager when a prosperous merchant came to her West African village and offered to take her away to a nearby city and teach her a trade.

With nine other children, Anagblah's parents had no money for school. So they sent the girl away with the woman, Akouavi Kpade Afolabi, hoping she, too, would find prosperity.

"She said she was going to buy me a sewing machine," said Anagblah, who was the first alleged victim to testify yesterday on the opening day of a trial in federal court in Newark where Afolabi is accused of running a human trafficking ring.

Authorities say she smuggled girls from Togo and Ghana to New Jersey and forced them to work without pay in hair braiding salons in Newark and East Orange.

Most of the alleged victims were uneducated and spoke no English. To control them, prosecutors say Afolabi used fierce beatings, threats of voodoo curses and draconian rules, which included forbidding dating or telephoning Africa without permission.

"You work every day. You don't make friends. You don't call home "¦ and if you disobey you get beaten," Nancy Hoppock, deputy chief of the U.S. attorney's office's criminal division, said during her opening argument yesterday.

But Afolabi's lawyer, Olubukola O. Adetula, urged jurors to listen skeptically to prosecutors.

The lawyer has argued the girls were, in fact, paid. They were not forbidden from making friends -- they worked in public salons, Adetula said. As for calling Africa, the lawyer said it is complicated to reach a village where the nearest telephone is miles away.

The attorney described Afolabi as a benevolent mother figure, who once adopted an infant abandoned outside her home in Togo. The girls, he said, she treated like daughters. "She took them in. She took care of them. Clothed them. Housed them," Adetula said.

Afolabi sat quietly during the arguments, wearing a yellow floral print shirt and black slacks, which concealed the shackles binding her legs.

She was arrested in 2007 along with her former husband and son. They have already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit forced labor. Both told a federal judge that Afolabi, who has been in custody since her arrest, was the group's ringleader.

Prosecutors say the group manipulated a visa program to slip up to 20 girls and women into the country, ranging in age from 10 to 19. If convicted of forced labor, Afolabi faces up to 20 years in prison, said Shana W. Chen, an assistant U.S. attorney.

During her testimony yesterday, Anagblah, now 24, recalled Afolabi's large, two story house in Lome, Togo's capital city. There were about seven other girls living them when Anagblah arrived in 2000. They worked six days a week selling jewelry in the market, and they were forbidden from talking to men, Anagblah said.

She testified that when Afolabi suspected her of breaking that rule, the defendant tied five mango switches together and ordered the girl onto her knees.

"She beat me all over my body," Anagblah said.