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There are indications that the slave trade is flourishing in Africa. In Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, the human traffickers are becoming increasingly bold. Children are seized from indigent parents under a lame pretext. Street children are kidnapped in broad daylight. The girls generally end up as domestic servants or are forced into prostitution. The boys are put to work in the fields or made to toil in the mines in the north of the country, where gold and blood diamonds are produced. A young member of the Salesian Order, Brother Lothar Wagner, who came to Sierra Leone from Germany two years ago, runs a centre for street children in the capital Freetown. He is determined to fight child slavery. When youngsters from his centre began disappearing without trace, he built up a network of informers, appealed to the public, and set up shelters at strategic points throughout the city - houses of refuge for children. As a result, he has repeatedly received threats to his life. This film documents how Brother Lothar traces children who were kidnapped from the hospitals when they were still infants. He searches for them on plantations and in factories, where they are forced to work. He discovers them at secret collection points in the city and at the smugglers' moorings in the port of Freetown. He goes into orphanages and prisons, and even ventures into the notorious diamond mines in northern Sierra Leone.
Tuesday, December 6th 2011 at 9:06PM
Siebra Muhammad
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