Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2014 | Page 26

nonprofit sector to do high-quality recovery work for people who had
sustained extreme human rights abuse and need very individualized
long-term protection and care,” he says.
So while most aid organizations focus on disaster relief, public
health, or agriculture, Talmage built one around psychology, social
work, law, advocacy, and social enterprise. “Hagar was an opportunity
to build an organization very good at taking an individual person with
complex personal, social, and legal problems and helping them recover
and get back to community,” he says.
Shaima, for instance, was a teacher in Afghanistan before she was
deceived and forced into sex work and then found guilty of “running
away from home.” Through training from a Hagar coalition, a
government official identified her as a victim rather than a criminal,
and as a result, a police investigation uncovered an international
trafficking ring. Hagar continues to work to ensure that Shaima, now
21, receives the care she needs.
The Beautiful Dream Society supports a shelter for trafficked
women in the small mountain nation of Lesotho in southern Africa,
where Karin Sandstrom M.A. ’08, a trauma psychologist, spent the
past two years working as program director.
“My job at its most basic level is to hold out hope for people,
because often they don’t have hope for themselves,” she says. “I don’t
know how non-Christian counselors do it. But I’ve seen amazing
changes in people when they start releasing anger and extending
forgiveness. It’s easily the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”

Prevention: Dignified Work
Sarah Aulie ’04 runs Hand & Cloth, a nonprofit that partners with
local organizations to offer dignified work to vulnerable women in
Bangladesh, an export country for the illegal trafficking industry. After
a visit to Kolkata, India, Sarah wanted to help girls whose mothers
worked in red-light districts. She saw an opportunity to harness local
blanket-making traditions and sell the textiles to American consumers.
Sarah ended up shifting her partnerships to Bangladesh and now is
helping on the preventive side. Many of the women in Kolkata’s
red-light district were trafficked from Bangladesh, so providing
dignified work in a region vulnerable to trafficking is a way to help
fewer women end up in the brothels.
“Prevention is happening,” says Sarah. “If women have work, they
are less likely to follow a trafficker to the city for a job.”

Research: On Resilience
Emily Goldberg ’10 spent her HNGR internship with Mosoj
Yan, a residential home for street girls in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The
organization is one of the HNGR program’s longest-running
placements, having hosted 13 Wheaton students over the past 15 years.
24     w i n t e r   2 0 1 4

Above: Young women in Kolkata teach
Sarah Aulie ’04 the Kantha stitch.
Center three photos, pages 24 and
25: Timothy ’10 and Asharae Brundin
Kroll ’10 traveled to Bolivia with Emily
Goldberg ’10 to photograph everyday
life at Casa Albergue, a residential
home where girls who have been
abused or lived on the streets find
safety, education, and the means
for holistic transformation. Page 25:
(top) Talmage Payne ’92 (right) with
co-workers from Hagar International;
(bottom, left) Wedding photographers
Jonathan and Michelle Oxley Hoffner
’07 raised $52,000 to help victims
of sex trafficking in Honduras;
(bottom, right) While in Lesotho,
Karin Sandstrom M.A. ’08 did some
prevention and awareness work in
orphanages.

Emily returned to Mosoj Yan in July 2012 to research her dissertation for
a doctorate in clinical psychology from George Fox University.
Her subject: identifying the factors that correlate with resilience among
teenage girls recovering from street life and sexual exploitation.
“Mosoj Yan’s program is excellent and sees about an 85-percent
success rate of girls who go on to live successful, joyful lives off of the
streets,” says Emily. “However, there is tons of heartbreak, frustration,
and sadness over the 15 percent of girls we can’t seem to reach. It’s not
as clear-cut as you would think. It’s not just that girls with the ‘worst’
pasts don’t do well and girls with less obvious trauma succeed.”
For two weeks, Emily gave the girls psychological tests measuring
their resilience and collected data on their pasts. Now she is examining
the data for connections and hopes to publish her findings to help not
only Mosoj Yan, but also other organizations.