We all love a challenge once in a while. For many of us, a personal challenge creates an opportunity for self-betterment. But for Niverville resident Sylvia St. Cyr, it means bringing a stranger one step closer to freedom.
On October 13, St. Cyr headed to Arizona to begin a four-day trek down to the bottom and back up to the top of the illustrious Grand Canyon. It was called the Freedom Challenge. The goal for St. Cyr, and the six women who accompanied her, was to promote awareness of the plague known as human trafficking and to raise money to help combat this widespread injustice.
Freedom Challenge is an initiative of Operation Mobilization, a non-profit dedicated to bringing medical care, emergency relief, education, and job skills to people around the globe. This is just one small part of the organization’s important mission, but its mandate is enormous: to free oppressed and enslaved women and children all around the world.
According to the Freedom Challenge website, 40 million people in the world today are slaves to human trafficking, and 24 million of them are women and children. The average age of these modern-day child slaves is a tender 12 years. This epidemic can be found in the forms of sex slavery, child marriage, debt bondage, and forced labour, and nets a profit of $150 billion per year to the traffickers. It is said to be the second-fastest growing industry next to the illegal drug trade.
“Last year I was reading a blog, randomly, and [the author] was talking about how she did the Freedom Challenge and it just hit me, ‘That’s something I have to do,’” says St. Cyr. “I’ve been passionate about doing something to help people out of human trafficking in some way for quite a while now.”
St. Cyr began by researching the topic, believing that to build real passion for a cause you need to fully understand it. The documentaries and stories of human trafficking took her to dark places, she says, so she needed to find emotional balance as a wife and mother of two growing children.
“A statistic that became real to me is that the average age of someone who gets into [prostitution] is 12 years old,” says St. Cyr. “These predators are looking for people that need love. I have a 12-year old son. To think that him or my daughter would be sold and used [as slaves] drives me crazy and many of these children don’t have anyone to fight for them. So I feel like if I can help one person to know their worth and value, awesome. I’m not going to save everyone, obviously, but if I can raise even one person’s awareness, great.”
St. Cyr set out on the first portion of the challenge in January. Her goal was to raise $5,000 for the cause. After numerous fundraising events and outreaches on her social media pages, she was astonished to have exceeded her goal by $1,500.
Next, she commenced training for what would be a gruelling adventure. For 16 weeks she set out to build muscle, strength, and endurance. Three days of every week were dedicated to strength training. On Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays she ventured out on hikes, finding a variety of trails in Pembina Valley and the Whiteshell where elevation changes and landscape challenges could add to the experience.
She soon discovered that finding the right equipment was essential to her success as she added more and more weight to every hike. Forty pounds of weight is what she’d been told to expect during the Freedom Challenge, as they’d be carrying all their supplies on their backs, including food, cooking utensils, clothing, a tent, and sleeping gear.
Just months before the scheduled date for the trek, Freedom Challenge notified all of the hikers of a change to the original canyon route. The new route would take them down from the northern rim, a trek they said was equivalent to that of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Hikers were welcome to back out. St. Cyr was not swayed.
She arrived in Utah the day before the hike and was sent off by her husband and children, who had accompanied her on the drive down. She was met by her cousin from British Columbia, who had committed to hiking alongside her. A single day of group orientation led to the first stage of the trek, a three and a half hour van ride to the northern rim. It was a commute she describes as harrowing.
“It had rained the week before, so the ruts on the road were a foot deep,” St. Cyr says. “The worst I’ve ever seen. At one time we were almost sideways and I thought the van was going to break. It was an adventure just getting there.”
But the bus didn’t make it, its progression stopped by a washed-out road. They were saved by a driver in a passing pickup truck who was able to transport them the rest of the way. By 10:30 that morning, they were finally able to set out, descending 3,000 feet down the canyon wall. It took them eight and a half hours to reach the bottom, their first stop en route.
St. Cyr describes the hiking trail as one of the most difficult she’d ever seen. Rocks, loose stones, and tree roots riddled their path, making the descent at times treacherous.
“My cousin almost died,” she says. “She was tripping and running. She finally caught herself on a rock. There are small rocks littering the path, so rocks are just constantly moving and tumbling. The poles were our lifeline. Every step was so calculated.”
By dusk they were able to set up their meagre camp and enjoy an evening meal before bedding down for the night. The morning brought St. Cyr’s next challenge: a migraine headache that she was sure would bring her adventure to an end. The team encouraged her to drink water and eat, believing that the migraine may have been brought on by dehydration. It worked and within hours they were setting out for day two of the challenge.
This day would be an easier one, hiking only two and a half hours along the canyon bed. They filled their water containers from local springs and set up camp again, carefully seeking out flat rocks to pitch a tent.
“Our motto was, ‘Leave no trace,’” St. Cyr recalls. “The best camping spot is not made, it’s found. You find flat spots and you put your tent there. You move a rock, you put it back in the morning. Everything that gets cooked is eaten. All the waste goes into someone’s backpack.”
Day three began with some pleasure hiking. Backpack-free, they trekked through an area she calls The Narrows, best described as stunningly beautiful.
“You feel like you’re on Mars,” she marvels. “There’s tons of different marbling in the rocks and the water coming down leaves red and black streaks. There was a tiny pool that some people went swimming in. We felt so free without our packs.”
By the afternoon, the reality of their trip returned as they began the steep ascent back up the canyon wall. High winds slowed their trek, causing them to stop for the day before they’d reached their halfway point. To complete the trek on time, the final day meant rising long before the sun and completing the first portion of their final ascent in total darkness, guided only by the light of their headlamps.
The adventurers arrived at their destination safe and with only a few blisters and sore muscles to remind them of what they’d just completed.
“I would be able to summarize it like this: the first two days I definitely thought I might die,” laughs St. Cyr. “The last two days I kept thinking, ‘This can’t be almost over. Can we just stay another night or two?’ It was so liberating, not wearing make-up, being in the wild, eating and communing, and totally getting close to these strangers [that were now friends]. It was an incredible experience.”
But, she says, they could never have done it without the seasoned experience of their two guides, both young women who’d completed this trek many times before.
“I don’t have good enough words to describe them,” she muses. “They are amazing. They had 70 to 80-pound packs the whole time. They would carry other people’s packs and always be encouraging.”
In total, 29 women completed a Freedom Challenge at the canyon that weekend, all separated into groups and hiking different portions of the immense, rocky gorge. Together they raised $130,000 which will be used at the front lines of the fight against human trafficking, hopefully releasing many from its ugly clutches.
St. Cyr says she used the words of William Wilberforce to guide her as she followed her passion to help others find freedom: “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
On the morning of Sunday, November 25 at the Maranatha Church, anyone interested can hear St. Cyr tell her entire story.