In honor of the late George and Mary Saurman, I would like to premise this article with a request that an eye be turned to a cause which burned in my grandfather’s heart until his last day. Besides being a volunteer trained Ambassador with Shared Hope, he was passionate about the condition of our indigenous people, and the obstacles faced by native tribes to this day. Within the realm of human trafficking and exploitation, we know that American reservations have some of the highest numbers of missing and exploited women. This is an area of great need, and a population who is greatly underserved.
Exactly one year ago today, my grandfather began a “trip”, as he called it, in an airplane to see his mother. He was 97, mentally sharp as a high school kid, but dealing with the slow shutdown of his heart. Honestly I didn’t think he would ever die. Since the pandemic began, he contracted and beat Covid twice, suffered the isolation of nursing home lockdowns and still came out fighting; writing letters to politicians and advocating for human rights. He was always fighting. And winning.
October 1st of 2022, my mom called me with news that my dear grandfather was not well. Truthfully, I did not take it very seriously. Poppop always overcame every ailment he faced in life, and I was nowhere nearby to come visit. I was in Brazil, which is home for me and a 30-hour flight to the states. We agreed to FaceTime the next day and wait for the doctor to assess the situation before booking any tickets. Oct 2nd my grandfather and I had a wonderful conversation through my tiny phone screen. He was alert and present. Nothing was spoken about death, no goodbyes were said. Just see you soon Poppop, I’m praying you feel better!
And he did feel better. The next day he experienced what we now know is a called a rally. As a politician, he had been through many rallies. This was an end of life rally, unbeknownst to my family who greatly enjoyed an onslaught of jokes and old stories. I got a call that night. “Poppop had a great day today. Got to visit with the whole family, going to bed now. Very tired, hospice will evaluate tomorrow.” I left for church that night in peace that things were okay at home, one of our girls from the rescue home cried on my lap during worship. She had fresh self-inflicted cuts on her arm. It had been a rough day for her, as most days are for any trafficking victim, especially a 12-year old going through a messy adoption process. I stroked her hair as I prayed over her. As much as I would have wanted to be next to my grandfather right now, I think he would have wanted me to be exactly where I was on that cement floor in Recife, holding Victoria. I got home late that night just in time to receive another call. “Kate, Poppop passed.”
To be completely transparent, I’m not sure if I was more sad or angry. He left without saying goodbye? He wouldn’t do that. Why didn’t he wait for me to get there? The next morning felt like a dream, I thought about staying in bed but couldn’t do it. I was coordinating a training on trauma for our 70 person staff, educating the team on how trauma affects us all; and how we could better care for the kids we serve in our rescue homes. Poppop would have showed up at the training. No doubt, he would have showed up. I made it through about the half the session before sneaking out the door to go home and pack my bags.
The human brain is a strange place. As noted in the beginning, the week before passing, Poppop had been talking a lot about a flight he had to take to see his mother. Various times, this plane came up in dreams, visions, or were they memories? It went so far that he even told the nurse the morning before he died, that he was leaving today. He was making his trip. And so I made another kind of trip in an airplane, it was very stressful and involved an emergency landing in the Amazon. Twelve years I lived in Brazil and never visited the Amazon until this unexpected, and tragic sequence of events dropped me the middle of a territory I had always dreamed to see, but never had the time to visit. The Amazon: the largest rainforest on planet earth; trees stretching for miles and miles. Immense trees that all started with a tiny seed. How many years of history in each branch? Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, they say, it bears no fruit. By the time I finally got into PA I don’t remember much, just that I had been meditating on trees for some time. I was thinking about Victoria, and how her father was native, maybe from this very region. Why are we born into the families we are? Some family trees we are not born but grafted into, and in all of them, life and death are so closely intertwined. Victoria whose biologically family had been killed in a car crash which left her enslaved to an aunt, understood this better than most. Roots and branches overlap and fight for space, water, and sun. Families are messy. They are the best and worst of relationships. And for my family, funeral preparations began the next day. There is nothing like planning a funeral to expose stories long buried. But I won’t get into that here. Instead let me try to circle back to the point of all this. Legacy.
Government legacy. It’s hard to separate my grandfather’s life from government. I write this sitting outside the Harrisburg state capitol. Poppop gave his body to science. So I come here in place of visiting a grave. The lights are under construction. Covered in scaffolding and black tarps; drawing my attention to the stairways and the statues; which upon examining more closely depict a bunch of nude men covering their faces. There is a woman either being rescued by, or hiding from a mob with scrolls in their hands. I suppose I shouldn’t make assumptions, but seems like the classic narrative of ages…I’ve lived it, watched those around me live it, and we stand on generations who have lived it. It’s the ongoing, unraveling fight against oppression, exploitation, abuse and slavery. “Liberty and life are the gifts of heaven”, is written on the bench below this scene where I sit. “Knowledge is the only foundation on which republics can stand”. Yes knowledge. If only more people knew.
That’s what Poppop always said. And once he knew something, he would make sure something was done about it. I have a half memory from this place, the capitol. As a very small girl, maybe three – entering a rounded doorway under a low hanging and elaborately carved ceiling of gold; to use the bathroom. My grandfather was being sworn into office. I also remember his desk, and placing his name plate on it, and running my hands over the frame of a round mirror by the hallway. A frame I’m sure I was not supposed to touch, and therefore felt all the richer to have done so. This was a palace of sorts. I didn’t quite understand why we were there. And I’m still not sure why I sat here looking up at the domed ceilings. Except for that, one year ago the house of representatives passed a bill here honoring the sacrifices our family had made, as George Saurman shared his time and life to better the community. Honestly, I’m not much for politics. You know that one relative at Thanksgiving dinner who always seems to have a different opinion and just can’t seem to keep their mouth closed, that was me. I often found myself sitting next to Poppop at holiday meals and debating most everything. The roots of my family go way back to the revolutionary war in Philadelphia, yet I found myself stuck on this one person in our family line; an unnamed Native American woman. I made it my responsibility to point out the way we had treated her people; the First Nations of this land. To my absolute shock, Poppop didn’t know the plight of the indigenous peoples. This was apparently not taught in schools when he grew up, and horrified to finally discover the truth, he dedicated the rest of his life to their cause. I learned from him at a very young age; with knowledge comes responsibility. And when I first came upon the knowledge of human trafficking, I too had to act.
In 2010, human trafficking was not something widely talked about in PA. In fact the first state bills against trafficking were not passed here until 2014. Very, very few at the state or local level were informed, let alone trained to respond. I first witnessed the horrors of this industry in Thailand, and a few months later moved to Brasil as a missionary working to help women get out of prostitution. As much as my grandfather loved America, and believed reverently in government and policy change, he might have been the only one who seemed to understand in those early days why I chose to leave. At that point, we were not an established non-profit, a social service, or even trained. I was on the groundbreaking team of 7 people figuring out how to do this one day at a time. Spending all night on the streets, days in the slums, making terribly dangerous decisions, we served one person at a time until we had a greater strategy. None the less, he was one of the first people to support me.
That was my grandfather. He was always serving one person at a time. I worked in the behavioral health system before moving to Brazil as a patient advocate. I remember randomly telling Poppop about the peer program that my agency staffed at the state psychiatric hospital. He responded casually that he had started it. My dad chimed in, ”Oh yeah, he used to bring the patients back to the house to play piano and roll cigarettes. They weren’t allowed to smoke at the hospital.” In the 1960s, this was unheard of. Today I wonder how many of those patients were childhood survivors of exploitation. With untold and unbelieved stories, in a system who denied the existence of such realities. We’ve come so far.
When Poppop learned that human trafficking was happening here in the states through Linda Smith’s book, Renting Lacy, it was game over. I believe he was around 90 when he signed up to be a state ambassador. I was in Brasil full time at that point, and I would hear only bits and pieces about it when I visited. But he was so involved in so many things, I didn’t take it too seriously. I regret that very much in retrospect. He would always tell me, “Kate I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but I’m just saying Shared Hope is very impressive and well organized. Such nice people, doing amazing work.” I shrugged it off. It wasn’t until he passed that I really started to understand what my grandfather was doing with Shared Hope. And what Shared Hope was doing for American legislation. Exhausted after the long trip home, my dad passed a box that Poppop had set aside for me with all his training materials, as well piles of emails that he had printed off with laws, and contacts, and ideas. Looking through the materials I was shocked…all these years. Connecting politicians in Harrisburg to help change state law, advocating, raising awareness. I was able to send out emails and notify the individuals in the box of his passing. An overwhelming response of condolences flooded in. Somehow the kindness of these strangers, seemed to soften the pain I felt.
I hope George Saurman’s story has inspired you and I have adequately honored him through it. It was he, and so many others in prior generations who laid the foundation for the work we are doing now. At the end of the day, this is all about family. Prevention and rescue, start and end with family. They start and end around a dinner table, making room for those without one. You don’t need to be a politician to be an advocate. It’s not a social issue but brothers and sisters we are serving. It’s all about loving the one in front you. We’ve all been grafted in to this tree of life – you are never too old or too young to make a difference. Sometimes it’s only through digging up the ground for a memorial that we see the ways in which our roots are so much more intertwined than we think. As one Native American proverb says, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds”. We must celebrate the somewhat challenging fact that change is often slow, deep, and generational. So don’t lose hope. Only time can reveal the fruit of one’s labor.
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