Overview
It’s day 11 of this deployment and a lot has happened. We’ve had eight people sick, an attempted mugging, identified over a dozen minors and had personnel need to go home early. It’s been exhausting but fulfilling. Yesterday our team took some much needed time off to recharge. This has enabled us to recommence operations this afternoon, continuing well into the night.
This trip kicked off with four days of training in a neighbouring country and we are now seven days into the live operation. As always, we can’t give many details… but I can say that we’ve identified over a dozen minors that are in our sights, and at least three traffickers who we’d like to see taken down. We expect this number to increase as we ramp up our efforts.
Reshuffling personnel has provided some challenges this trip but we fully support the decision of those who needed to leave early to return home to family. The remaining new team members have been doing really well, and we have an additional surveillance member who has been a huge asset to the team.
A shadow ahead
The other night as three investigators and I were dropped to a well-lit area to walk home, I noticed a shadow ahead. As I focussed, this single shadow soon turned into three. I alerted the others and we turned around and upped the pace. More assailants joined them silently on motorbikes and soon we had seven people closing in on us in the narrow alley.
We broke into a brisk jog, all the while scanning our surroundings for anything we could use to defend ourselves with. They followed us for a short while, but soon after gave up on following us.
While we believe it was most likely a random, unconnected mugging, we have changed up our route to accomodation since then.
Thank you for standing with us