R.A. Dickey fights human trafficking in India

[LittleOzzy]

Toronto Blue Jays right-hander R.A. Dickey continues to set an admirable example for us normal folks. Admirable and unattainable! After accepting the Cy Young Award at the BWAAA dinner in New York on Saturday night, Dickey announced via Twitter that he is off to India with his family for the Bombay Teen Challenge. That might sound like a kids game show, but its mission could not be more serious:

A year ago, R.A. Dickey was gearing up to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. This month, in a related adventure, he is preparing to go to India with his two daughters to work with a mission that rescues women and girls forced into the sex trade.

His climb raised money and awareness for that cause. His trip to Mumbai aims to advance that effort and enlighten his daughters.

“They’re opening up a clinic up that was once a brothel, so it’s incredibly poetic,” Dickey said. “I’m going to get to go down there and kind of serve with the Bombay Teen Challenge, and get to expose my girls to something that I hope gives them a real heart for humanity.”

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-l ... --mlb.html

[flatjacket1]

At first I read this title as "R.A. Dickey human trafficking in India"

I was very concerned.

Even if he sucks but at baseball when he comes over (I don't think he will, I think he will be great), he's a guy I don't mind making millions of dollars for stinking.

[satyr9]

At this point I wouldn't be surprised by the headline: "Dickey defeats intergalactic terrorists on Alpha Centauri" or "Dickey invents Cold Fusion and Food Replicator on same day"

[raps4589]

RA Dickey for president

[LittleOzzy]

R.A. Dickey takes daughters to India

R.A. Dickey said the pictures and literature couldn't have prepared him for the young boy who approached him last week on one of the squalid streets of Mumbai's red-light district.

The boy was maybe 3 years old, 4 at best. He had no pants on. His body was covered with open sores.

"He was playing amongst the open sewage and filth with rats as big as dogs. Unsupervised," the Toronto Blue Jays' new knuckleballer told The Canadian Press on a conference call Tuesday from India's most populous city. "You see these images and pictures that just don't seem like they should exist. And you hope that it's the only one ... but that's what's representative, these lives that just don't have a voice."

The 38-year-old is in Mumbai to work with Bombay Teen Challenge, a Christian organization that has rescued women and children from sex trafficking for the past 23 years.

It's a cause that Dickey says speaks to his own narrative. He wrote about being sexually abused as a child in his autobiography "Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball."

"It's authentic to me because of my past experience, also I have a sentimentality to it because the girls that I've seen firsthand in the streets, these 19-, 20-, 21-year-old girls. You have to look beyond that and see at one point they were daughters themselves, and having two daughters ... that just for me was so compelling."

He made the trip with his daughters, 11-year-old Gabriel and 9-year-old Lila.

"I want to give my children a heart for humanity," Dickey said. "The only way to really do that is to get them outside of the bubble that they live in, and expose them in very measured ways to what real life is to a lot of people. They've responded beautifully."

The 2012 NL Cy Young winner said it's been "a roller-coaster" visit, from the visceral red-light images of women in doorways and the cages where they keep them when they're first trafficked.

But he also saw hope.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/88965 ... rafficking