What in the World

Programme one looks at Soccer Slaves – up to 20,000 young footballers have been trafficked out of Africa, left to fend for themselves on the streets of European cities. Alone and abandoned, Malian Issa Kone sat in a McDonald’s in Paris with €20 in his pocket. He was only sixteen years of age and he had just arrived in France. He waited hour after hour for the return of his agent who had promised him a football contract and in the process wheedled €5,000 from his impoverished parents in Bamako. The agent never returned. Issa’s story is not unusual. Up to 20,000 young footballers have been trafficked out of Africa, left to fend for themselves on the streets of European cities. The What in the World team film in Paris and Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon to investigate the scale of this modern slave trade. Among the people we meet is legendary Cameroonian footballer Roger Milla.

He wouldn’t give us his name and he would only agree to be interviewed in a heavy disguise but there was no disguising the horror of his life. His mother died when he was just six years of age. He never knew his Dad. He was just eight years of age when he shot his first victim, was a heroin addict at twelve and describes his first frenzied killing at the age of fourteen. He told us of the goose-bumps he still gets on hearing the screams of the tortured. The film is located in the Mexican city Juarez, just over the border from the United States. Conservative estimates indicate that that 60,000 people have been killed in drug related violence in Mexico since 2006. We talk to grieving parents and fearful young people as well as one young man caught in the brutal web of violence.

The mother named him Michael and we filmed his arrival into the world. Life for the very young in Uganda is precarious. One in nineteen children die before they reach the age of five in Uganda. But an initiative by Irish and US governments is trying to turn that round. The first 1,000 days is all about improving the health and nutrition of children and their mothers. In central Uganda, where one time war lord Joseph Kony held sway, the results are encouraging. Less so in the Karamoja region to the east. How Michael will far in life will be a test of the 1,000 day initiative.

Sixty-one year-old Israeli citizen Izhak Rossenbaum was the first person to be convicted of human organ trafficking in the United States. In the company of Berkeley University Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes we visit the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, New York where an organ trafficking network operated and in which Rossenbaum was a critical player. The kidney is the most trafficked of all human organs and the World Health Organisation estimates that 10% of all kidney transplantations are illegal. In an attempt to track this illegal trade we travel from LA, to Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Cork, and to Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israel.