A local organisation is helping families escape the grip of modern slavery.
In Pakistan, families who borrow from kiln owners often find themselves trapped in a vicious, ever-increasing cycle of debt.
Freeslaves is a Mosgiel-based charitable trust that helps free families from these crippling loans.
In Pakistan, there are more than 25,000 kiln factories producing bricks, the main building material.
Families work by digging and transporting clay, shaping it into bricks and loading the bricks into kilns to be fired.
Freeslaves co-founder Geoff Woodcock said for bonded slavery families, their working day started at 4am and ended about 4pm or 5pm.
"The kids will all work as well.
"They will do that seven days a week for the rest of their lives."
Mr Woodcock established the organisation 10 years ago.
He and wife Melanie Woodcock work on the New Zealand side of the operation, and Freeslaves employs people in Pakistan to work directly with families.
In Pakistan, medical care had to be paid for and families would usually sell everything they had to try to pay for it, he said.
When that was not enough, families would go to owners of kiln factories and take out loans.
"They try to get a loan to save the lives of someone in their family.
"They will sign a contract to live and work at the kilns until the loan is paid off.
"Except the interest on the loan compounds at higher than their ability to pay it off, and so they are effectively trapped there."
That was why it was called bonded labour slavery.
"Because they have taken a bond, they have taken that initial debt that then enslaves them."
At the extreme end of some kiln factories, there were guards with AK47s who had orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave.
"You will have rape, torture, abuse, exploitation.
"At the ‘nice’ end, they get their work done and there is not as much violence," Mr Woodcock said.
That did not mean conditions were good.
Mr Woodcock related a story that one of the Freeslaves staff working in Pakistan shared with him.
"He goes ‘I went up to a 16-year-old boy in a kiln and went to shake his hand and he winced, and I realised he had a broken arm’."
In addition to having no medical care, workers can experience severe abuse.
Even children can be abused.
Freeslaves staff work on the ground in Pakistan to pay off families’ loans, using funds donated through the organisation’s website.
The average cost of the loans per person last year was $US110 ($NZ195) and the average time in slavery was 10 years.
The process of paying the factory owners was carefully documented.
"The kiln owners have a logbook where they keep an accounting of all the debt that is owed plus the bricks that are being made.
"They deduct the pay from the bricks and they put it into the loan, but the loan is still going up."
Once the money was paid, the kiln owner reconciled the logbook.
"So we witness that the logbook has been officially cleared," Mr Woodcock said.
Mrs Woodcock said even before paying off the loans, Freeslaves staff made sure the families would be supported.
"When they turn up on the day to meet the kiln owner to settle the debt, we already have a place for them to live, a job for them to go to and we give them cash for food for a month," she said.
"We help them relocate, bring in a cart if they need to move their belongings, which usually are only just a handful of things."
The charity keeps in touch with freed families, doing what it can to support them.
Mr Woodcock said there was an incredible transformation when visiting families after they had been freed.
"When you look at a kid at a kiln working, there is this vacancy in their eyes.
"But when you see them free and the light comes back to their eyes, it is incredible."
Mrs Woodcock said the charity had a multi-pronged approach to supporting families so they did not feel forced to go into bonded slavery.
"We are effectively the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
"We would rather be the fence at the top," she said.
The charity runs initiatives such as community-based mobile medical clinics for families struggling to afford medical care and running schools to help people learn to read and write.
Since the first family was set free from slavery in November 2014, Freeslaves has redeemed 950 families (4476 people).
"When you are motivated to actually change something positively, that is empowering.
"That is what we see with our donors, they carry that joy of ‘wow, I can actually help make the world a better place’," she said.
An estimated 25 million people live in bonded labour slavery, of which half are children, so the work is far from done.
Mr Woodcock said any level of donation was welcomed, even if only $5.
To give, visit freeslaves.org
