Awareness in action

One afternoon last spring, instead of poring over a book in the campus library, University of San Francisco student Erika Myszynski found herself knocking on the door of what claimed to be a massage parlor in San Francisco’s Tenderloin slums.

The woman who answered the door was wearing a lab coat that scarcely concealed lingerie underneath. She opened the door a crack and anxiously shooed Myszynski away, despite the fact that she visited during normal business hours.

Walking away, Myszynski realized that she got a firsthand glimpse of something that was, at the very least, a likely prostitution operation, and perhaps something even worse.

And for the Costa Mesa native, that amounted to another class assignment.

Myszynski is going to be a junior at the small, Jesuit, Bay Area college where she has linked up with a group of students and professors who believe that activism and education go hand-in-hand.

The organization calls itself the Erasmus Community — named after a 15th-century theologian — and has been working to combat the modern-day slave trade, concentrating on women who are sold into prostitution and children who are recruited to be soldiers.

It is more than just a normal extracurricular activity for many of the people involved, some of whom spend 40 hours a week.

“It became a huge project on our campus, and it just keeps growing and growing,” Myszynski said.

During the past semester, Myszynski and several other young women investigated massage parlors in San Francisco that they suspected might be involved in the sex-slave trade.

They focused on businesses that had telltale signs of impropriety — opaque walls with no windows, young girls walking in the door, a clientele that consists exclusively of men, odd hours of operation.

The university cautioned them about getting too aggressive, so most of the work consisted of going through city records to check for up-to-date permits, for example. But curiosity sometimes got the better of Myszynski, who would occasionally stake out parlors for 24 hours, monitoring who came and left.

When solid evidence could be found, she and her classmates would tell their professors, who would determine whether to alert the authorities or members of an anti-human-trafficking group called “Not for Sale.”

If people were staying overnight, that was seen as a clear indication that the establishment was home to some of its employees, perhaps women who had been brought over from different countries and forced to work as prostitutes as a means of survival.

Myszynski recently expanded her field of reference beyond the streets of San Francisco. She flew to Uganda and spent two and a half weeks with former child soldiers and sex slaves living in refugee camps, documenting her visit with 25 hours of video footage and 500 still shots that she intends to meld into a production.

As an aspiring journalist, Myszynski said spreading awareness is her preferred method of getting involved.

She interviewed a variety of former slaves who are being taught to make wheelchairs for the disabled or repair cars as methods of reentering society. Many had harrowing tales that they told with stone-cold, emotionless stoicism.

One boy she spoke with had been approached by rebels while he was out in the field with his aunt. The rebels killed his aunt in front of his eyes and carted him off to become a soldier.

He told the story without a tear in his eyes, but Myszynski said she had trouble beating her own tears back.

“I just know that if I went through some of the things that these children went through, I don’t think I could recover,” she said.