BYU-Hawaii soccer player fighting 'national disgrace' of child trafficking in Ghana
The most impressive person in college sports this school year may not be the football player who wins the next Heisman or the teenager who becomes the next No. 1 pick in the NBA draft. It may be an athlete from a team you’ll never see on television with a story that has nothing to do with winning a national championship of any sort.
That’s because you have to look pretty far and pretty deep to find this story: halfway across the Pacific Ocean, to a Division II women’s soccer team in Hawaii. It’s a story of survival and of faith, of getting out of a hopeless situation and then of returning to that place in order to save others. It’s a story that’ll make you feel like you’ve accomplished very, very little in your own life but also one that’ll inspire you to do more.
Lillian Martino-Bradley is a 19-year-old sophomore soccer player for the BYU-Hawaii Seasiders. She’s a pretty good player, quick on the pitch, technically sound and with a high soccer IQ. Her coach says that she would have been a surefire Division I talent if not for a slew of knee injuries in high school.
But that will be the last mention of athletics in this story. Because the most impressive story in college sports isn’t really a sports story at all. After all, the soccer exploits of a young woman battling for a starting job on a team that finished 4-13 last year isn’t exactly something that’ll make your ears perk up.
Instead, listen to the story of what brought Lillian to this Mormon university, where she majors in intercultural peacebuilding and aims toward fixing the atrocities committed against children just like her in her homeland of Ghana. It’s a story about the worldwide fight against human trafficking, which – if this Division II soccer player hadn’t been rescued from Ghana at age 3 – would have enveloped her own life.
“It’s hard for even me as her coach to understand what she’s gone through let alone for other 18-year-old girls to understand it,” said her soccer coach, Mark Davis. “Just the amount of faith she has. She never complains. It’s so contagious with the girls. She’s just so stinking impressive.”
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Lillian was born in a field. There were no doctors on hand. Her uncle helped her mother deliver Lillian, born amidst tall grasses and to a future that seemed doomed. At best, Lillian would have the same life as her mother, a life of selling goods along the dirt roads in order to buy food for her family. At worst? At worst it would have been a life that you and I could never even imagine.
Lillian’s mother died from childbirth complications. She never met her biological father; he was from another tribe, and it was taboo to marry a woman from another tribe.
Her uncle raised her, but they were desperately poor. Her uncle would leave her at home when he went to work, and when he came back her body would be covered with ants. She’d walk miles with him just to get their mail. When she got a rare treat, it was a boiled egg.
“I don’t remember any of it,” she said recently. “I was adopted really young.”
Meanwhile, in Heber City, Utah, some friends of Lois Martino had just come back from a two-year Mormon mission to Ghana. In Ghana, they had met Lillian’s uncle. They knew he wasn’t capable of raising her – and they worried that she could be sold into slavery. Human trafficking is a huge problem in Ghana, especially in coastal towns where boys are sold into slavery as young as age 4 to work in the fishing industry. Estimates for the number of boys enslaved at the country’s largest lake range from 1,000 to 10,000. As recently as 1997, an estimated 5,000 young girls and women were sex slaves in the country. In the capital of Accra, an estimated 30,000 children are enslaved to work as porters, according to the U.S. Association for International Migration, which runs an anti-trafficking campaign in Ghana. Another international non-profit described Ghana’s human trafficking industry as “a national disgrace.”
“Trafficking in Ghana is very, very ingrained in society,” said Maria Moreno of the International Organization for Migration. “It’s selling your children because you cannot afford to take care of them.”
At the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ward where Lillian’s future family belonged, the couple came back from their Ghana mission and told the ward, “This little girl needs to be adopted.”
Lois Martino and her husband, who owned a chemical company, had three sons. The youngest was in kindergarten. They made up their minds that this was something they were supposed to do. They traveled to Ghana, and at Lillian’s uncle’s tin hut in their tiny village, they met the girl they would adopt. She didn’t have a birth certificate. She was small and malnourished, her stomach protruding from a lack of food. When they took her to breakfast, she’d eat one grain of rice at a time, as if she were savoring every bite.
“Then she’d look at us, and say, ‘More?’ ” Lois Martino recalled. “And she was so surprised when we said yes.”
In Utah, Lillian acclimated surprisingly well. Classmates loved playing with her braided hair. She never experienced racism even though the town was virtually all white. The hardest part was food, but slowly, she began eating more: from strictly pineapple and rice to pasta to meat sauce to bread.
At age 13 the family decided it was time for Lillian to visit her old home. She had no memories of the place. They boarded a plane to Ghana. As they were landing, Lois gave her adopted daughter a warning: When you get off the plane, she said, it will be overwhelming. The heat. The humidity. The noise. And most of all, the smell. Lois thought it smelled like sewage.
“I walked off the plane, I breathed it in, and I was home,” Lillian said. “It was such a natural thing for me. It was a powerful feeling of connection, just so connected to who I was. Even smelling that air – it was kind of musky and different, but it was me. It was my home. My body remembered that.”
“It was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen,” her mother recalled.
Lillian Martino-Bradley escaped horror in Ghana as a child and now is helping others do the same.
The trip changed her life. Not just seeing her uncle, or meeting both sets of grandparents, or visiting the orphanage and school that her adoptive parents had funded in Ghana after adopting Lillian.
It was because when she visited Ghana, Lillian learned a family secret: That when she was born, Lillian had been promised to a man in another tribe to become his sex slave in order to settle a tribal dispute.
And it was because she befriended a boy who was about her age and who was living in her old village.
And after Lillian returned to the United States, she learned that the boy – a boy she’d spent time with just months before – had been sold into slavery.
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This is how a 19-year-old college sophomore comes to start an international non-profit that has so far raised more than $20,000 through fundraisers and has opened a safe house in Accra for victims of human trafficking who are in the midst of court cases against perpetrators.
The boy’s name was Enoch. His grandmother accepted money from a man who said he would put the boy to work.
“This grandmother, they have nothing, and she doesn’t know how to feed her family,” said Lillian’s mother. “Someone came to her and said, ‘This is the oldest and strongest of your grandsons. I’ll put him to work on a farm and send the money home.’ It’s a matter of sacrificing one for everyone.”
When Lillian and her mother learned he’d been sold, they knew they had to do something.
But what?
It’s not like she could just fly back to Ghana, pluck Enoch from his captor and set him free.
The money never came home. The Martinos hired a private detective in Ghana. He tracked Enoch to a remote plantation miles into the bush, where he was doing farm work. Somehow – Lillian doesn’t know how – the private detective was able to wrest Enoch away from his captors. The captors were in the midst of sending a busload of children to Nigeria to be sent to a different plantation, the private detective told the Martinos.
The private detective called the Martinos after rescuing Enoch, and here’s what Enoch told them: “I thought I would be lost forever.”
Now he was free, but he didn’t have money for food or education or housing. Back in Utah, Lillian held a fundraiser. She put up fliers around town. At the rec center in Heber City, she held a benefit dance for Enoch. The money she raised became the seed of something much bigger.
“From that moment on I realized how much I could help, how much everyone can help,” Lillian said. “You get people together. You have passion for a cause. And you can really make a special, significant impact in people’s lives.”
Since then, Lillian and her mother have visited Ghana a few times. They set up the safe house in Accra, which has so far helped 19 children who are dealing with the legal system after having been victims of human trafficking. They found a local man to run the safe house; Enoch works there, too. They have raised more than $20,000 for the non-profit – it’s called Fahodie for Friends; “fahodie” means “freedom” in Lillian’s native dialect – but need more. The majority of the funding has come from friends and from Lillian’s adoptive father’s estate. (He passed away when she was in high school.)
Lillian has spoken out against human trafficking here in the United States – at her school, in her hometown – as well as in West Africa, where she has given speeches to hundreds of young adults in Liberia and in two Ghanaian cities. This summer she got married, to a Mormon young man from her hometown who had spent his two-year mission in Ghana. She knows millions of children worldwide are sold into slavery, and she knows she could have easily become one of those forgotten numbers.
Where will her non-profit go from here? She’s not sure. But she’s had conversations with her husband about possibly moving back to Ghana together to fight this issue first-hand. She was saved from tragedy when she was adopted from Ghana and came to the United States. But she knows Ghana is part of her.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she moves back,” her mother said. “She knows this was why she was saved. She knows this was why she was adopted. She was put on this earth for a reason, and this may be the reason.”
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
