If you're an American, you may think slavery went out with the Civil War.
But if you are a villager in war-torn Sudan, you probably know slavery still endures.
The Rev. Ray Hammond, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, and his wife, Dr. Gloria White-Hammond, co-pastor and a pediatrician at Boston's South End Community Health Center, are among those who have not only reflected on man's inhumanity to man that slavery represents, but who have felt moved to do something about it.
Sometime soon, the Harvard-educated clergy couple expect to take a trip to the Sudan, this time with enough cash to buy a diesel-powered grinding machine that would ease the workload for former slaves.
The Hammonds became interested in African slavery through the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International, a group that helps to buy back freedom for slaves.
Dr. White-Hammond says she and her husband came face to face with the slave-redemption effort in the summer of 2000, when they saw 900 women and children come into view in the Bahr el Ghazal region of southern Sudan.
The entourage had been enslaved years before, when Arab militiamen, using the country's bitter civil war as a pretext, raided the Dinka villages in southern Sudan and carried away the women and children after killing the men.
But now was the moment that anxious relatives and friends had been awaiting.
John Eibner, a 1974 Barrington College graduate and a leader in Christian Solidarity International, had recruited a number of Arab intermediaries to go into the north and get the slaves from their owners -- whether it was through an offer of money or cattle, an appeal using the teachings of the Koran, or by helping the slaves to escape.
Whatever method had been used, Eibner seemed not to care. What he did care about was that the slaves had been retrieved. Sitting with the chief retriever in a dusty field, Eibner reimbursed him the equivalent of $33 for each recovered slave -- or nearly $30,000.
Mr. Hammond says the scene was a poignant reminder that the freedom that Americans take for granted is still "a distant dream" for many around the world.
"Of course," he says, "as an African-American, I had a sense of seeing a piece of my own history being reenacted."
Given her medical background, Dr. White-Hammond quickly moved from the role of a clergy-observer to one of physician, tending to serious medical needs.
Her conversations with some of the patients were heart-wrenching. A woman talked about how after her capture she had tried to persuade the slave raiders to allow her to carry her two toddlers instead of the raiders' loot.
The raiders had a simple "solution" to her request: They killed the children.
Dr. White-Hammond found the tales sobering.
"I felt it was the first time I had access to the sordid experiences that I had only read about in the slave narratives," she recounted one evening last week.
"The gang rapes, the female genital mutilation, the beatings and stabbings, the having to live outdoors with the goats and to eat only what the masters had left over -- these were all things our ancestors talked about, but nothing I experienced up close and personal."
She says the stories gave her a new understanding of what her ancestors, carried away as slaves on the Middle Passage had to endure.
"I used to wonder 'What were my ancestors thinking?' Now I think I know.
"I think they were thinking about people like me. They were thinking that if they could hold on, maybe one day there would be somebody like me who would have access to wonderful institutions of learning, who would have titles and live in a nice house, and see her responsibility to do everything she could see that such things don't happen again."
To help make sure those women who have had to endure slavery are not forgotten, Dr. White-Hammond went back to Africa last summer and will be leaving with her husband for yet another trip to the Sudan "very soon." For security reasons, they prefer not to disclose the dates.
To be sure, Dr. White-Hammond says she and her husband are simple "foot soldiers" in a slave-redemption effort.
"There's a misconception out there that we have bake sales at our church and then go and use the money to buy slaves," she says. "That's not accurate."
Most of the money for the effort comes from donations to Christian Solidarity International, primarily from Europe, followed by the United States.
And unlike the international's Eibner, whose organization is credited with purchasing freedom for 70,000 slaves in Sudan during the last eight years, the Hammonds see their role as primarily helping to educate others about the project -- and bringing some badly needed economic and medical help to former slaves.
On the educational front, the Hammonds acknowledge that some groups, including the respected Human Rights Watch, oppose slave buybacks, contending that they only add fuel to the slave trade by giving those who are thinking of capturing slaves another reason for doing so.
But tell that to a woman who has been badly beaten by her slave masters and would never win freedom without outside help, Dr. White-Hammond says.
If the slave redemption effort is fueling the slave trade, says Mr. Hammond, you would be seeing more raids on villages and more people taken into slavery, "but the numbers are going down."
He thinks they're dwindling both because of mounting pressure on Sudan's government by the United States, and because many of the southern Sudanese villages that used to be targets in the past -- typically villagers with greater numbers of Christians and practitioners of traditional religion -- are now better able to defend themselves against the slave raiders.
Human Rights Watch and some media outlets have also raised the possibility of fraud.
Mr. Hammond acknowledges that some well-intentioned individuals and groups were probably duped into paying large sums of money to people posing as Arab middlemen to "redeem" people who were never slaves in the first place.
But that's not the case with Christian Solidarity International, he says. "They work closely with local authorities, and they know the people they're dealing with."
When slaves are redeemed, he says, the agency photographs and fingerprints the freed slaves and checks the information against its database in London to make sure there has been no "recycling" of slaves.
As it is, with Sudan's civil war winding down, the Hammonds believe the times are calling for a shift in emphasis.
This upcoming trip is Dr. White-Hammond's third as a member of the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group. This time, the Hammonds will be bringing along money to purchase the diesel-powered grinding machine that they say will liberate hundreds and perhaps thousands of Sudanese women from the laborious chore of pounding grain -- allowing them to devote time to other things, such as learning to read.
The machine is already waiting to be picked up and transported, and Dr. White-Hammond has been talking with women's groups about how they plan to operate and repair the machine and divide profits.
Operating under the name of My Sister's Keeper, they've also invited a physician from Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to accompany them on the trip. The doctor would advise the one Sudanese physician they know has a clinic there how to defend the population against the ravages of HIV/AIDS.
Two possible approaches: conducting an educational campaign among the women working the grinding machine, and having the doctor spend 12 weeks in Boston to study at Harvard Medical School's AIDS Institute.
"We have a narrow window to jump on the HIV issue before it becomes rampant as it is everywhere else in Africa," says Dr. White-Hammond. "AIDS is the one thing that can deep-six all of our work, and that includes any slave redemption work, or any of the transition work."
"We have to get on top of it now."
