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| Timothy Sexton is walking 750 miles in France to help spread the word about the modern slave trade |
LOVELAND -- When Timothy Sexton learned there are 27 million people living in slavery, he couldn't sit still.
He had to do something. So the 26-year-old St. Xavier High School graduate and Loveland resident is walking through France this summer "to spread the word about the modern slave trade and raise money for an organization which fights it," according to his Web site, www.Firstgiving.com/walkforfreedom.
On May 9, he started his Long Walk for Freedom near Cherbourg, in the very north of France. During his walk, he will talk with people he meets about modern slavery both to raise awareness and to raise $6,000 for Free the Slaves. Free the Slaves is a non-partisan, non-profit independent American partner organization of the Antislavery International, devoted to ending slavery around the world. Antislavery International was able to abolish 19th century slavery in the British colonies.
After walking about 750 miles, Sexton will finish in Perpignan, in the very south of France. He expects his journey to take about 2 1/2 months.
Even if he finishes early, he intends to continue his walk. He will meet up with his younger brother in Marseille, France, Aug. 1.
Tim's mother, Kathleen Sexton of Loveland, shipped his tent over to France for his summer walk so he could camp along his route.
"I'm real proud of him," she said. "It's a great application for him, being able to tie in the history, being able to do something for someone else, seeing France, and meeting people along the way. He speaks both German and French. I just think it's a great idea."
The idea came gradually for Tim. He majored in history and German at the University of Florida, and did research on German views of slavery during the 19th century. He called it an interesting and very academic topic, but it seemed to him to lack a real-world application.
In 2003, he went to Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to study the way Europeans viewed slavery in the United States during the Civil War, Kathleen said.
Then, in one of his classes, he heard that Antislavery International still was active today.
"I remember being pretty surprised -- If the Antislavery International was still active, that must mean that there are still slaves," he wrote.
Then he read "Escape from Slavery," which is a "first-hand account of a Sudanese boy kidnapped from his family by militiamen at the age of 8 and made to work as a slave in the north of Sudan until he escaped to Egypt," Tim wrote. "He later came to the U.S. as a refugee and now speaks out against the modern slave trade."
Tim learned about other slave trading conducted in the world.
"Slavery means forced, unpaid labor performed by someone not permitted to leave," he explained on his site. Forced labor is work forced under threat of corporal punishment.
"Historically, this definition fits slavery in the American South as well as in most of the New World until the end of the 19th century, but also applies to prostitutes held by force in countries such as Thailand; servants held in hereditary slavery generation after generation in countries such as Niger; children kidnapped from Southeast Asia and then deprived of documents proving their identity who then work as domestic slaves in such places as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and children kidnapped from the south of Sudan by militiamen-slavetraders and forced to work in the north of the country," he wrote.
This summer, he is finding his own real-world application of what he learned. Since he has spent this past year teaching English as a second language in Marseille, France, and he had the summer free, he decided, "what better way to get to know the country better, and doing something useful at the same time?"
Kathleen says she thinks travel is in her family's gene pool.
"We love it," she said.
She met her husband, Patrick, in college just before he went on a missionary trip to Honduras. Their daughter is taking an internship in Mongolia, working for Mongolian network TV. "Through my daughter, I have been able to do a lot of traveling," Kathleen said.
She and Patrick, a painter with Sexton Services, moved to Loveland from Finneytown eight years ago. She teaches fourth-grade social studies at St. Columban School in Loveland.
"Teaching social studies, there are so many opportunities to show the kids the world is a bigger place than just Loveland. I like all that history stuff."
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