"...you just got an email from the U.S. State Department."

A recent Tuesday was “panel day” for me at the University of Alabama. In addition to leading the international award-winning Alabama Public Radio news team, I also work with students. Many of our intern graduates are working “in the industry” in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Miami, Atlanta, and throughout the Southeastern U.S.?

Still, others I have to coax along.

During my panel, I joined colleagues from TV news, marketing, and the web to talk about our careers before an audience of UA journalism students. I took a chance and quoted the Roman philosopher Seneca. His definition of luck is when “preparation meets opportunity.”

That was my message, and it's how my career had gone. I started as weekend anchor at the ABC-TV affiliate in Gainesville, and then moved to public radio because it better suited my style of journalism. That put me on course to cover the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. That led to reporting on 103 shuttle missions nationally on radio. All of that put me in a position to become news director at Alabama Public Radio, where our latest “deep dive” investigation is on preserving slave cemeteries in Alabama. https://www.apr.org/news/2022-10-06/no-stone-unturned-preserving-slave-cemeteries-in-alabama-an-apr-news-series. Another example of where “preparation met opportunity” was when APR received a kind invitation to speak on our 14 month investigation of human trafficking.

The offer came from the U.S. State Department. And, it was an example of where “preparation met opportunity" at APR. The agency wanted me to address a delegation from Africa on our human trafficking project. My audience included representatives of Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Djibouti, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Burundi, Tunisia, and the archipelago of Comoros. It bears mentioning this delegation didn’t read about human trafficking in the newspapers. This group handles all aspects of trafficking in their countries. The delegates included Konton Marie Therese Dansoko with the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in the west African nation of Mali and Belinda Issakou Amadou with the Department of Labor in Benin (pictured with me above.) They, and all the other delegates, were selected to visit through The U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program. It’s has been around since 1940. Former delegates who went onto to become world leaders include Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Anwar Sadat, and Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias of Costa Rica.

Here’s where the title of this article comes from.

I was “hip deep” in production for APR’s nine month investigation into the preservation of slave cemeteries when the State Department started emailing me. Much to my chagrin, I was too busy to check my box that week. The agency sent another note, and “cc’d” APR’s classical music director David Duff. The next morning, I was grinding away on my computer, doing an edit on the series, when Duff showed up at my office door.

“Pat,” he said. “You just got an email from the U.S. State Department.”

Well, that doesn’t happen every day, I thought. The organizers of the African delegation requested a talk from me on human trafficking, and even offered to bus the representatives and their translators to the University of Alabama campus.

I dissuaded them.

The student body was returning to campus for the Fall term. That meant 40,000 young people and their parents, many of whom were likely unfamiliar with Tuscaloosa, would be in the area. “How about I come to Birmingham and talk to them there?” I offered as an alternative. They agreed.

The meeting at the Birmingham Hilton felt like a “mini United Nations.” State Department translators were at the ready to make sure both sides understood what was being said from French to English and back again. I even had a little earpiece, so agency personnel could whisper the translations for my benefit.

There was a great exchange of ideas during my talk. Along with Ms. Dansoko with the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in the west African nation of Mali, and Ms. Amadou with the office that works to stop child labor for the Department of Labor in Benin, there were representatives of law enforcement and the courts. Good questions came on media coverage of trafficking court cases in Africa, and how APR handles victim interviews, etc. One delegation member was Judge Taha Chebbi, who heard trafficking cases in Tunisia.

“How do you know the trafficking victims you interviewed were actually victims of sex or labor crimes?” he inquired during the question and answer session.

Good one, I thought. I responded that APR was connected to all of our “victims” by non-profit groups that support people harmed by trafficking. We relied on this organizations to vet our victims to ensure authenticity.

Another question came from a delegate in full military style uniform. Marie Gomez is Chief Commissioner of the National Police Force of Guinea. She’s also her country’s human trafficking liaison with INTERPOL. Gomez shared her frustration at not getting media coverage when Guinean traffickers are convicted. I heard a lot about the media’s role in shining a light on human trafficking. I assured Commissioner Gomez how APR spent 14 months and 3,000 miles on the road investigating the child sex trade in Alabama. It was a disturbing subject, but worth it. That included familial trafficking, where adult family members sell their children. We also reported on labor trafficking, how different generations of victims are lured into the sex trade, and why LGBTQ youth appear especially at risk. Also, we interviewed cybercrime sleuths from Birmingham who scour the “dark web” to track sex workers as are they are moved from state to state. ?

Several delegation members wrote afterward to say they would take APR’s effort to journalists in their nations to try to encourage more coverage of human trafficking. A new challenge at Alabama Public Radio—living up to that kind praise. Delegation member Amadou Sow investigates child labor trafficking cases for the Ministry of Geology in the nation of Senegal. He wrote…

????????“Many thanks to Alabama Public Radio for the important work they do in the fight against human trafficking. The media has a central role to play in the fight against this phenomenon by organizing investigations, reports, broadcasts on this subject, but above all by collecting testimonies from survivors,” Tweeted Amadou.??

APR will work to be worthy of that sentiment—especially coming from people tasked in the fight against trafficking. I mentioned earlier how the audience?included Konton Marie Therese Dansoko of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in the west African nation of Mali. It turns out Dansoko knows the work of my friend and colleague Ousmane Sagara, also of Mali. He was an international exchange journalist in the APR newsroom in 2016. Ousmane also helped us on our international award-winning documentary “The King of Alabama,” on the 50th anniversary of the death of Doctor Martin Luther King, junior.

My talk led to a follow-up invitation from the international diplomacy group Global Ties Alabama. They asked me to be on an panel discussion on the child sex trade in the state, as part of the group’s Global Perspectives Institute. This is the same group that helped coordinate my address before a U.S. State Department delegation. Past topics with the Global Perspectives Institute included the war in Ukraine, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and international child custody issues.

Again, for me, an example of preparation leading to opportunity. That was a point I made sure the students at my panel discussion at the University of Alabama heard about.