As published for the Roosevelt Room:

For an American, hearing the term “slavery” usually is an echo of history. The word conjures images of chained Africans cruelly crammed in boats for the deadly transit to shores in the western hemisphere, an ugly practice ended centuries ago. We think of Harriet Tubman and the American Civil War.

So for us it’s startling to hear the word with our 21st century ears. It’s hard for us to believe that slavery in any form still exists, but the Lake Volta region in eastern Ghana is still one of the places where trafficking of children for forced labor still exists.

Ironically, slavery survives here only a couple of hundred miles from where the buildings that once auctioned slaves destined for America now are tourist sites, and only a couple of hundred miles from where President Obama spoke last summer — the first African-American president, an inescapable symbol of our own troubled history.

But slavery here, as witnessed launching from boats at what passes for a dock in the sleepy port town of Kete-Krachi, while only a couple of hundred miles away, seems ancient measured against our social conscience.

The slaves of Lake Volta are young boys and girls — sold by desperately poor parents at ages as young as three or four years old. They’re sold to brokers in outlying regions for as little as $20 and brought here to work on the lake from dawn until dusk — rowing boats, pulling fish from nets, mending nets, and — dangerously, often fatally — swimming to untangle nets from the branches of the hardwood forest Lake Volta has hidden ever since it was created by the damming of the Volta River in the 1960s.

The young boys who survive mistreatment or injury and make it to the age of 11 or 12 display taut, rippled bodies, evidence of their days rowing and swimming on the lake. Those that reach the age of 14 or 15 have the strength to run away for good, but lacking any formal education — only the skills to lead their own fishing crews. But many don’t survive.

Slavery and forced labor here is not limited to Lake Volta. In fact, a similar system of slavery is found in the cocoa plantations of this country and neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. But cocoa is a commodity sold on global markets by large corporate confectioners now averse to reputational risk should their products — often marketed with children in mind — carry the stain of the mistreatment of children at its source. The result has been concerted efforts by non-governmental organizations, governments, and confectioners to address labor and slavery issues in cocoa production. The government of Ghana is in fact working to stamp out slavery in this important cash crop.

But micro-scale smoked fish production on the shores of Lake Volta, is far distant from global markets, consumers, and the attention of western media.

Indeed, the mid-Lake Volta region where Kete-Krachi sits is remote. Under the best of conditions the “short” route is an arduous 6 1/2 hour drive from Ghana’s capital city of Accra. The last 4 1/2 hours of the drive are over a rutted dirt track — a dust bowl at this time of year that turns into a muddy quagmire with rain, as well as a 35-minute ferry crossing at the ramshackle port village of Dambai.

The team from Touch a Life Kids (www.touchalifekids.org) with whom I traveled to Kete-Krachi this week regularly makes this trip in their efforts to end child slavery on Lake Volta.

TAL’s task is daunting. The region is not merely remote — it is vast, encompassing villages on hundreds of miles of shoreline. Altering the local sensitivity to this issue, and upsetting what has become a traditional economic system, is incredibly difficult.

In my next post, I’ll describe TAL’s efforts to rescue child slaves, provide some detail of the economics of both the slavery and fishing activity on Lake Volta, and efforts TAL is taking to end child slavery here.