In honor of Human Trafficking Awareness Month, Kristina Glackin, a poet and former Kirkwood Community College student, spoke in Iowa Hall on the first floor stage on Jan. 30.
She shared stories of her childhood, her human trafficking experience and her process of recovery from it all.
Glackin has been spreading awareness and prevention tactics with her speeches for several years.
When Glackin was just 18 years old, she said a man approached her at the mall and spoke to her with a kind of compassion she didn’t receive growing up.
Their relationship grew over the following weeks but halted once he brought her to a hotel and forced her to sell her body.
He trapped her in the hotel, starving her of food and benevolent conversations for one week.
One day, she was left alone with a woman she had met one time before. The woman told Glackin that she was her two years prior and warned her of her inevitable death if she stayed.
She advised Glackin to tell the men who passed through and eventually one man was receptive to her pleas. He helped her escape.
Throughout her speech, she spoke of her faith in God and how it carried her through her trauma. Connecting with Him was a turning point in her life.
“This night, in the middle of a panic attack, I broke down and I cried out to God,” Glackin said in her speech. “Now, it wasn’t some like eloquent thing. It was ‘Why do you hate me? Why would you even make me be alive if this is what my life was going to look like?’ And so then, I asked Him to take my life.”
She said, “Now, when I laid down, every time I laid down and closed my eyes, it felt like I stopped breathing, so I panicked and I was like okay, God may be a real God, and I don’t want to die, but if you make me wake up tomorrow you have to do this for me because I can’t do this. I can’t do it.”
“And so, I don’t remember falling asleep, but I remember waking up and I remember having peace for the first time in my life, and I remember feeling like maybe I can do this if you’re going to do it for me. And I had this joy and this peace and this love, and I was like okay God, you actually heard me,” she said.
Glackin began her speech with a spoken word piece about her human trafficking experience.
Around the space in Iowa Hall, more of her poetry resided on black stands for the audience to read. She said she started writing when she was 13 and used poetry as therapy.
She added that it helped her process the situations going on in her life. Glackin said about writing, “I stopped, and then after God got ahold of my life, it kind of just reawakened.”
She said she used her faith in God and her passion for poetry to spread awareness and help other people.
To learn more about her journey, go to https://www.kristinaglackin.com/.
Categories: Art & Life
