A few Liberate the Chains members work a table to raise awareness about human trafficking out in the Edison community recently.EDISON — Walking a street in a poor village in Mehsana in western India, Divya Mehta felt a tugging on her leg. She turned around, and a boy held his hands out to her, beseeching, begging for money.
The boy had no eyes.
She asked her aunt, a doctor, what disease he had, why he had lost his sight. She quickly found out from the stories the villagers told there that the boy was basically an impoverished orphan, and someone had purposefully put out his eyes to make him a better beggar – so people would pity him more, perhaps give a bit more money.
“The stories people told me shocked me,” said Mehta, a 16 year old from Edison. “Everyone knows about it – but nobody does anything about it. It made my angry.”
Since that trip to India, her birthplace, in December, Mehta has now formed a group to try and do something about it. Liberate the Chains, a group opposed to human trafficking, now has 20 members, mostly made up of students from the prestigious Wardlaw-Hartridge School, where she is entering her junior year. Tonight she and the group are throwing a fundraiser at the Akbar Restaurant in Edison off Route 1 and I-287 that includes dinner and dancing – and which they hope will raise thousands for the victims of human trafficking worldwide.
The money that the teen-led group goes mostly toward Not for Sale, a California-based global non-profit that opposes human trafficking in all its forms, Mehta said.
The event tonight is $25. The group has already sold 80 tickets, but expects many more to be sold at the door. The festivities include a fashion show, a raffle, as well as dinner and dancing, and it lasts from 6 to 10 p.m.
Mehta, who moved to the United States at the age of 5, said she welcomed with open arms the statewide human-trafficking crackdown unveiled last week by state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa. But she said the mental images of her prosperous Edison hometown and the destitute villages of western India still spur on her own small efforts, with Liberate the Chains.
“We have so much, and they don’t,” she said.