Arten; Our Turn
The moment that tips life toward whichever ‘win’ we’re battling for. How do we get here?
Day 11 of the Zoe Challenge. It’s right at the end of the day, a long day of steep climbs and unforgiving weather conditions.My body is crying out for me to stop. I’ve been sick six times already and about ten to fifteen miles out from our hotel Tom stops the whole team because he’s noticed i’m weaving about in the road.
Up ahead the rest of the team were battling their own exhaustion and Tom is the first to notice that i’m actually shaking so much my bike is shaking too. It’s him who recognises i’m riding out a sugar crash. I haven’t kept enough of my food down and we’re burning around 5,000 calories a day in the saddle.
We stop and eat and then continue at a much slower pace. Tom keeps one eye on me all the time, he tells me later he was torn between worrying I was going to wobble myself into the path of a lorry and thinking I was going to accidentally take out one of the other team members as my bike staggered about.
It’s at this point, somewhere beyond just dig and dig and dig, that we ride into a town called Arten. Our turn. Tom and I look to each other and we’re spurred on because you know what? It is our turn.
I’m fighting a personal battle with my own body but we’re on the road because of a much larger fight, one being fought across the globe against the oppressive, soul-crushing injustice of human trafficking.
That fight is now and it’s urgent. We can not leave it to others.There is so much still to do, so many more girls like Zoe and guys like Gabriel to reach. I hope everyone who reads this recognises that it’s our turn to be ‘that’ generation. The one that abolishes slavery, in all it’s grotesque forms. It’s our turn to end it.
Inspiration comes right at the end of the day. So often we miss an ‘our turn’ moment because we gave up earlier along the road. It’s easy to do. I’ve kicked my bike and flopped to the ground enough times in the last week to know that much. Yet we cannot give up if we’re going to enter into the realisation of our dream, whatever it may be. Bono, a great champion of the struggle against extreme poverty said this:
We cannot end this until we recognise that we can end this.
His words and this journey remind me that Europe itself let alone the rest of the world has faced many fights against evil but this fight - this fight is ours. We will not stand for the buying and selling of lives. We will not stand for the brutal exploitation or the violence. We will not stand for human trafficking. It’s our time and our turn.
