A book by Bruce Ladebu
Out of the Slave Fields
Liberating Children from Brick Kilns and Brothels
With Jim Bryson. Foreword by Harold Eberle.
A professional adventurer turned anti-slavery operative chronicles twenty years of covert rescue missions across western Asia, and the children he pulled out of the brick kilns and trafficking networks.
About the book
Bruce Ladebu grew up chasing adventure from the Great Lakes to the Canadian Arctic. In the early 1990s a missionary trip through the former Soviet Union opened his eyes to child sex trafficking. A 2009 visit to Pakistan changed everything. Standing in a sweltering factory, he watched a mother sell her young son to the owner to feed her other children. That moment broke him and remade him.
He founded the Children's Rescue Initiative and spent the next eleven years building an increasingly sophisticated operation, moving from paying slavers for individual children to covert direct-extraction missions alongside ex-special-forces operators. Out of the Slave Fields follows those missions, centering the faces of the enslaved: Faisal, who ran alongside the departing car shouting that he loved them; Shaimah, born into a brick kiln and beaten with a metal rod; children who, asked their dreams, said only that they wanted to wash dishes.
What you’ll discover
Six threads that run through Out of the Slave Fields.
Faith as operational mandate
Rescuing children is obedience to Christ's command to defend the fatherless, not humanitarian sentiment.
The cost of comfort
Western complacency is complicit in slavery, and the comfort zone is a killing zone where callings quietly die.
Slavery as a system
Minority communities are kept in poverty on purpose to maintain a permanent labor supply, making slavery an economy, not just a crime.
Survivor dignity
Children are named, drawn as full persons with dreams, and followed beyond the rescue into new homes and futures.
Moral limits under fire
An honest reckoning with the temptation to use force, and the discipline required to protect local partners who cannot leave.
Ordinary people, extraordinary call
Abolition does not require special-forces credentials, only desire, obedience, and a willingness to be uncomfortable.
From the book
Something happened inside me that would change my life and the lives of many slave children forever. My heart broke for children.
Who it’s for
Written for Christians in the West who sense a call to justice but have never seen modern slavery up close, for supporters of anti-trafficking work, and for readers of missions memoir and narrative nonfiction.
Get the book
Available now on Amazon.
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