Saint Josephine Bakhita is the patron saint of human trafficking survivors and we celebrate her feast on February 8th.
Josephine Bakhita was born around 1869 in Darfur (now in western Sudan). She was of the Daju people; her respected and reasonably prosperous father was a brother of the village chief.
In 1877, when she was 7-8 years old, she was seized by Arab slave traders, who had abducted her elder sister two years earlier. She was forced to walk barefoot about 600 miles to El-Obeid and was sold and bought twice before she arrived there. Over the course of twelve years (1877–1889) she was sold three more times and then given away.
Bakhita was not the name she received from her parents at birth. It is said that the trauma of her abduction caused her to forget her own name; she took one given to her by the slavers, bakhita, Arabic for 'lucky' or 'fortunate'.
