About Lambadina Foundation
Creating Human Trafficking Awareness and Prevention
Once considered a crime that affected only poor third-world countries, such as Africa, Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe, human trafficking has entered our own back yard. In the United States, women, men, and children are at risk of being exploited for sex or labor every single year.
The Lambadina Foundation raises funds to support events designed to raise awareness and decrease the vulnerability of women, men, and children who are at risk of becoming victims of human trafficking. In addition, The Lambadina Foundation will focus on assisting those who have been human trafficking victims and help them receive necessary support and services. Above all, your donations will help us expose these crimes and those responsible for it, saving lives in the United States and across the world.
Our Vision
To help young Eritrean refugee women and their children live with dignity by providing food, shelter, clothing, and a safe home.
Our Mission
To create a path for young Eritrean refugee women and their children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to lead economically secure lives of dignity by providing them with a safe haven to learn new trades and life skills so that they can support themselves.
Our Long-term Goal
To help young and educated Eritreans find or create opportunities for themselves and others within their birth country of Eritrea. Such an approach will help reduce the current mass migrations and their associated risks. This will also minimize the short-term crisis situations that Lambadina Foundation is trying to address.
Our Founder Showa Sahle’s Story
Eritrea’s decades-long forced and limitless military service is a form of modern day slavery which, sadly, persons over the age of 18 cannot escape. This causes a total lack of freedom, not to mention opportunities to lead a normal life in Eritrea. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Eritreans, especially the young and educated, leave their country of birth by walking to neighboring countries. They often get sold to human trafficking gangs; thousands have died in the Sahara Desert and on the Mediterranean Sea. The most vulnerable among those who flee the country are young women and their children, who often end up homeless.
For the women and children who safely cross the border into Ethiopia, access to poorly managed refugee camps is an option for them. However, some of these women eventually leave the camps with their children, only to sleep in churches, the mountainsides, or anywhere they can find safety. It is these women and children who Lambadina Foundation will benefit. With help from the Bay Area Eritrean community center, research was done to find the worst-case scenarios. Twenty (20) women and their children, recent escapees from their birth country of Eritrea, have been selected as beneficiaries.
In my hometown in East Africa, we have lost approximately 4,000 young girls and boys and their mothers, all between the ages of 6 months and 35, as they were traded or sold for labor or sex. Among those were three of my first cousins (2 boys and 1 girl) who were 17, 20, and 22 years old when they became victims of this barbaric crime.
For them, and the millions of others whose lives are forever lost or altered due to these illegal acts, I have formed the Lambadina Foundation, a not-for-profit organization created to organize events and raise funds to promote the awareness and prevention of human trafficking in the United States and across the world.