Jess Ames and Maddy Beck chat with Elizabeth Ameling, CEO and Founder of one of Angel Flight’s partner organizations, Latisha's House. She shares how they provide safe housing and restorative care for victims of sex trafficking and exploitation, guiding them down the path of healing and recovery. Elizabeth presents the various methods they are using to help women deal with trauma and manage negative thoughts. She also shares some success stories of victims who refused to be held back by their traumatic experiences, spreading inspiration and awareness to all.
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All About Latisha's House
Welcome back with another episode of the show. We have Elizabeth. Elizabeth, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your organization?
I'm the CEO and founder of Free Forever Latisha's House Foundation and we run a national organization that provides safe house and restorative care for victims of sex trafficking. We help women over eighteen who have been trafficked and we also assist them with their children as they go through our program.
That's amazing. Some of the people that you are working with are somewhere else and displaced from sex trafficking and you're bringing them home. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
We get referrals from all over the country. Right now in the U.S., there are over half a million people being trafficked, and there are very few restorative care homes and safe house beds that exist. I mean, very few. There are 3,000 beds nationwide for half a million people. Fewer than 1% of the victims of trafficking ever find safety, which is tragic. They didn't get incarcerated, or they died of drug overdoses or something like that.
We get referrals from courts. We get referrals from non-government agencies. We get referrals and we bring them to our restorative care home we have to, one in Virginia and one in Florida. We are looking to expand capacity even by the end of the year because there's such a humongous need. We get referrals, we interview people every day, and we turn away 10 to 30 people a week, which is catastrophic.
That's interesting.
How do people find your organization?
A lot of it is, I think, word of mouth. We've become known. We're twelve years old. We have a gala coming up. We've worked for the space. I've been in it for seventeen years. We have good results. People get to know us. We're set certified. We deal with sexual abuse of children and we deal with adults. It's a holistic approach, not to overuse that word, but it's mind, body, spirit, dental, food, education, and GED classes. The courts know us and they like to have people come to our house because it usually has a good outcome. Nothing is 100% but our success rate in measure of people not going back to jail or being on the street is pretty high.
What are the criteria to work with Latisha's house?
To work with, you mean, to partner with us?
Yeah. For example, you just said that you have to turn away some people occasionally. What is the criteria?
Number one, we want you to be willing to change your life. People who've been trafficked get into a victim mindset. They are victims of crime. They've been sexually abused. They have mental health issues. They've self-medicated with drugs or they've been forced to take drugs. When they come to our house, it's like starting over. It's hard work. Nobody has a magic wand. If we did, we would have used it a million times over. A young lady will come to our home and we have a program and you're going to get your GED if you don't have it.
We're going to help you go to college and trade school. We've paid for grad school. You are going to learn about sobriety. We're going to help you deal with your emotions. You are going to get medical care and dental care, but you're also going to go back and learn to deal with your trauma because there's a lot of complex trauma across the board. It's hard work. We say to people when we interview them, this is not a place to sleep. We provide that and it doesn't look like jail or a psych hospital in town. It looks like a cozy Brady Bunch Home. Literally, it was built in 1960 and the white fixtures are 40 some years old and you think you're at the Brady Bunch House, truly, except for the orange paint, but it's a place to heal and grow.
Growing is hard. You have to deal with loss. You have to deal with an anchor. You have to say, “Why was I trafficked when I was twelve? Why did so and so do this or that?” You have to say, “That's not going to define me, but I am going to become what I want to become.” That's it. We cannot negate the past, but not everybody is ready to do that. We've had people come to our house and they think they're ready, but the trauma comes up and it's hard and they just cannot cope with it at the moment. We understand that. It's a cliche. Sometimes people have to hit rock bottom.
“We cannot negate the past, but not everybody is ready to do that.”
Success Stories
I cannot imagine what these people had to go through and the trauma that they have endured and just having the heart and the determination to want to change their life and get past what they've been through. Do you have any success stories that you'd like to share?
We do. How do you help people get to see that, our interview question, the last one is when you were a little girl before you were sexually assaulted, raped, or whatever, we say, “What did you want to be when you grew up?” In psychology, we talk about trauma is a T it's minus T and plus T. “Before the trauma happened. What were you dreaming about? What were you thinking about when you were fantasizing about what you wouldn't be when you grew up, what is?” You connect people to those hopeful dreams that they had and it's never being trafficked and it's never been what they've been involved in. We say that's possible.
That's how you connect them to something positive and then you deal with the trauma and you help them start to achieve new things. You have to build it basically on one thing at a time. When you come to our house, if you've been in a hotel, you may never have learned to cook. We had a girl who didn't have a boiling egg, literally. All they ate was ramen noodles in a hotel room. We have cooking classes and we do family dinners. When you learn to cook a meal for the first time and you present it, it's amazing. You have done it. You've proven yourself that you can do that.
You're not stupid, can I say this? Nobody's calling you a stupid bitch and a horn. Whatever, you are accomplishing something. We have literacy for life that comes. When you're sitting there and you are 32 years old and you never got to learn your multiplication tables and you learn them, and then you take your GED test in math and you pass it, we celebrate. We do S'mores out in the backyard and buy coffee. Everybody's having a great time. You learn. As you accomplish things, you're redefining who you are. That's really what it is. It takes about 2.5 years to 5 years to heal from trauma.
Quite honestly, psychological trauma scars people, but you can heal in spite of it. We pay for people to go to culinary school. We've had people become CNAs. We have a young lady graduating from college with her master's in psychology. We've loved her for twelve years. We went to three college graduations last year and I represented every parent they never had. It's hard. You sit there and you wish their mothers were there cheering them on and instead, it's me because they don't have moms. Most of our survivors, and their families traffic them and have exploited them.
That’s incredible though. I honestly don't know how you do it every day. I just think it's so inspirational and you just providing that support system for people. I don't even have the words to say how important it is.
We have sad stories and we have happy ones. We had a young lady from South Carolina and she said, “Ms. Liz's.” You got to draw it out there and she came to our house and she was dyslexic and her mother was a drug addict and she sold her daughter when she was twelve for drugs. You love your mom even when she does horrible things, right? Children love their parents even when they're bad.
She said, “All I'm good for is sex work. I cannot do anything.” She had trouble with her GED, and failed the ASAPTEP multiple times. We had a volunteer who was teaching everybody how to cook. She goes, “Sweetheart, you're really good at this.” Instinctively, she had this intelligence. She could make sauces that are great. Nobody else wanted to cook. They just wanted her to cook because her meals were the best. We said, “Have you ever thought about culinary school?” Now we have a partnership with the local culinary school.
We didn't, but she applied to culinary school and she got in. That's awesome. She was like when she graduated from culinary school, we went and her mother didn't come because she was still using drugs. Her brother said she shamed the family. She wasn't going to walk and get her chef coat and I forgot what the chef had us called. Anyway, we went to Charlotte and she walked. They said, “Who are they?” She said, “My family,” which was an honor. He said, “What? I just got goosebumps.” He said, “What can I say about Nancy?” Not a real name. He said, “She's like a still river that runs deep. Give her a problem in the kitchen and she finds a way to solve it.”
I was just like, “Ah.” Honestly, that's a success. My board, we bought her chef knives. I mean, like her whole set of chef knives to do. She goes, “Ms. Liz, I'm going to come back and work for you. I'm going to cook for the ladies.” I said, “No.” I said, “We love you.” I said, “I cannot pay you. Go live your best life. The only thing that she ever cooked that was bad was chitlins. Pigs feet and chitlins and people in the South love that. Colored greens I can handle, but chitlins make the house stink. It's a terrible smell. It's an acquired taste. It's like stinky French cheese. Apparently, it tastes really good, but it smells really bad. That's what it's like.
Partnering With Angel Flight
How did you guys hear about Angel Flight East, to begin with?
Heidi, who's our director of the program, who's with ladies, doing other things. She heard about it and contacted you all. We were so delighted because we had another safe house in Orlando. We also take people to medical care in Orlando when we cannot get it in Virginia. You have blessed ladies at house. I mean, it was amazing. I saw pictures of one young lady standing there and she said, “I was in the plane all by myself.”
She took pictures of the seat and out the window. She's like, “They did that for me.” I'm thinking, “Of course, they did. Your life is valuable.” It was such a blessing. She said, “I never knew anybody cared that much.” She said, “I was a VIP. They carried my bag on the plane.” I mean, it's just like, and all she'd never flown before either. You spoiled her for a commercial flight, just saying.
I love that. When we originally got the flight request from Heidi, obviously we're like, we're 100% all in anything we can do to support the work that your organization is doing and we put the flight request out and just said, it is a bit of a sensitive topic. We just wanted our pilots to know what her situation was. I remember the pilot called the next day and was like, “You would have never known that she's been through such a terrible time because she had such an incredibly positive outlook on life.”
He's like, “If you guys didn't tell me what the reason for the flight was, I would have never known.” I was like, that is just incredible and it makes us rethink like, “We think we had a bad day because our hair doesn't look good.” It's like, there's just so many other people in the world that are going through such traumatic journeys that you would just never know about.
I love that particular young lady and she had a crisis a couple of years ago. She was going to school and then she had a psychotic break and had to start over because the trauma just hit it comes in waves sometimes. Plus when people are healing you numb when you're in it, you disassociate and you turn your mind off so you can deal with all the otherwise you can die from trauma. Literally, you can die. You just disassociate.
Your body is experiencing something and you take your mind somewhere else but sometimes when you settle at your house and their activities and you see what other people's “normal lives” look like, it's very hard because you grieve the loss of all the things you never had. You grieve the loss of your innocence. You grieve the loss of school. You grieve the loss of friends. Usually, the biggest grief is losing parents.
Almost 100% of our women were sexually abused as children before the age of seven. It's the number one predicated for being trafficked. Number two, we've discovered in twelve years, that most people who traffic their children in our experience anyway are usually family members or friends. It's not the stranger putting a kid in the back of a van. I know that happens. That's an outlier for us. It's usually a mom or a dad or a grandfather or an uncle or somebody.
I just cannot even imagine being betrayed like that and then just having the courage to trust people again.
That takes a long time. I mean, we do a training called the heart model, which makes a lot of sense. The first thing is building rapport and trust. I say to my staff, “If you say you're going to do it, your word is your bond. If something gets in the way, because there's always something that gets in the way, then explain it and say, I haven't forgotten. I'm still doing it.” As we do that and we say, “We told you we would work on this, allow us. It takes time. If there's court stuff. It always takes time, medical stuff takes time.” As we prove that we keep our word and we're not breaking our promises, then people begin to trust. It's really lovely when someone looks you in the eyes and says, “I believe you're telling me the truth, I trust you.” That's a big part of healing.
Trauma Training And Providing Support
I love that. How can our listeners support the work that you are doing?
Lots of ways. One, we do trauma training. If the readers are there, we are doing training at Riverside Hospital in Virginia, but I'm a traumatologist, I will go anywhere I can do a full day of training for teachers, librarians, and medical professionals. We say, “This is what trafficking looks like. These are the identifiers. This is what you can do.” We do that. We don't charge for that because we believe an informed public can change lives. Women who are trafficked as children and as adults are not discovered easily. They've all been to a doctor. They've often been in school. They were not identified as being victims of sexual abuse and trafficking. It's really important.
“Women who are trafficked as children cannot be discovered easily when they reach adulthood.”
Once what you're looking at, then you can see it. If you're checking into a hotel and you've been to Florida and there's an older gentleman with a girl that doesn't look like him and she has no bag, and it's 2:00 in the morning, and she looks like they're not related and she looks scared or something, you want to be able to know. If you are working in an ED department as a PA or nurse practitioner or nurse and you have someone come in and there's a guy standing in the room with her and answering questions for her. If you're at the health department and they won't let you talk to the patient by themselves, it's a red flag.
If you identify it, so we have slides of tattoos, 75% to 80% of people who are trafficked are branded. We have the gang tattoos available to show because gangs brand the girls that they sell and the boys that they sell too. We have those identifiers. If you're in an emergency room and somebody comes in, they're bruised all over and there's a man saying, “She was hit by a car.” You kick the man down the hall and then you look. If you see a tattoo, say for MS 13 or Latin Kings or whatever, that's usually a sign that somebody's being trafficked. If somebody's bruised all over, you can ask them, “Are they in harm's way?”
If there's somebody cloying man or woman that won't leave the person alone, it's a sign because every woman at our house went to a doctor. They had children, they had abortions, they had illnesses, they had hep C, they've been to emergency rooms and they were never identified. Not because people didn't care, but because people didn't know what they were looking at. We do the training. That's number one. We have slides that we can share if we cannot go someplace and do it. The other thing is go to FreeForever.org because that's easier to remember to spell than Latisha's House because there are lots of ways to spell Latisha and you can see how to get involved.
We have a big dream about opening other restorative care houses. There are so few beds. Again, 3000 in the country for half a million people, 1600 of those are for adults. That means most people who are trafficked in this country today disappear, die of fentanyl poisoning or they're incarcerated. The cycle continues. FreeForever.org you'll see what the needs are. If you have a vision and desire to do something like this in your state, our model is very scalable and we will very gladly come and help you get it started.
We'd love to do that. My heart is so full of hearing this and so sad knowing that there are so many people still going through this. Like it's wild.
We needed like 75 more of Latisha's houses.
In Virginia alone. I mean Virginia is six right now in the nation. Florida is number two. It doesn't matter. If we're turning 10 to 30 people a week away, I mean, I got a call last night from someone and a victim witness and they said, “Do you have a bed?” I said, “No.” She went, “Shit.” I wish she had said, “We're working on it as soon as we can.” We are. We have a gala coming up this Saturday. We are raising money to buy a property that will allow us to do housing for moms and children called Hope Village in honor of a young lady who died six years ago.
We're going to have a second restorative care home. Eventually, we want to do a foster care home called the Storybook House, where when we go to court, the judge says, I'm going to try to sound like a nice judge. The judge says, “I'm going to send your kids to foster care if you don't get your life together. I'm going to sever your rights in three months, 12 months, whatever.” We're going to say, “Your honor, she's going to come to our restorative care home and she's going to be there eighteen months and heal and get medical care, comprehensive counseling, trade school, education, whatever.
In the meantime, we have another facility at a different place with certified foster parents that are loving and kind and those children are going to get the services they need. When they're healing, we're going to bring them together at Hope Village where moms will live with their children in a supportive environment. That's 2 to 3 years while she continues to heal and they continue to establish their family.” That's the dream is called the Freedom Project. It's scalable, restorative fair homes, scalable. The village is scalable.
A Young Lady’s Inspiration
I mean, we've got it down to nuts and bolts and the cost of putting in those houses. That's our big dream, but every state needs it. We get referrals from people saying, “I have a woman with five children and she's been trafficked. I have a woman with three children and she has into the end of December or they're going to sever her rights.” True story, real story. The young lady who inspired all of it, by the way, was LaShonda, and shout out for her. She's in heaven now. LaShonda was trafficked from Arizona to Virginia. She was arrested in Virginia, one of our big cities, and bonded to us.
She was charged with five felonies because number one, she was trafficked to twelve. Her stepdad raped her. She had a child. It is super common for twelve-year-old stuffed kids, and nobody reports a mistake, number one. Number two, her mother complained about her. She went to juvenile detention and then foster care. She met her trafficker in foster care. He moved her to Virginia and she had a child when she was twelve and then she had four more children with the trafficker. The trafficker was arrested.
“It is common for young girls to be trafficked by their own parents, and nobody ever reports it.”
That's fine. He got a lot of years, but they charged her with five felonies, child and data theft, and child abandonment because her children went to a hotel room unsupervised. She was sentenced to our house and she came. She got sober. She got her life right. She discovered God, which is always helpful. She went to culinary school because you can be a felon and go to culinary school. She got a job at a really good restaurant. The court said, number one, “Was she healed enough?” “No.” They said, “She has to graduate, but this day we're putting her in jail for 25 years.” We said, “Okay.” She had charges because if the traffickers are arrested, they will often charge the victim as well.
That is just a story of how broken. Anyway, let's put it lightly.
We graduated her from the program and they said, “She had five children.” They said, “She has to get a three-bedroom house.” Now she's a felon. Charges are not vacated or expunged. She has a restaurant job. She's making $22 an hour, which is the most. That's brilliant. We bought her a car, but she could not find housing. Her credit score wasn't good enough. It was 500 and she hadn't been in her job long enough. She has a felony conviction. When they run rental checks, they look for all of those things.
She ended up going to another city in Virginia and she rented from someone who was a drug dealer. Two weeks later, I got a phone call and they said she didn't show up to work today. We called the local police department to do a wellness check and she had died of fentanyl poisoning. The man who gave it to her was sitting there eating McDonald's. They didn't charge him because they said she was a drug addict, a prostitute, and a felon. We did her funeral and her culinary school class came to the funeral and her twelve-year-old daughter was there. The only people who ever had pictures of her life for us.
This is the reality though. Nobody ever cared about her. That's the reality. We played a video over chopping onions and laughing and then she wrote about her life and her life goals. Two things, one, we told her twelve-year-old daughter looked just like her. I said, “You do well in school. We'll pay for college for you.” Number two, I said, “We are going to do Lashonda's village.” I said to her, I looked at her laying there in the coffin. I said, “By the grace of God, we're going to keep this from happening again to the best of our ability.” That was five years ago. Our freedom project, we're going to have her story inside of each house. Her legacy is those moms who've been trafficked will have their kids. She's inspired us. Sorry.
No, it's okay. We do not like sweaty eyes in the afternoon.
We don't like sweaty eyes anytime but I think this show is like, honestly, I think at this point, we've made it so we just cry at least once a week.
We've cried enough this week. We don't need any more tears.
That's the thing. Her life is not in vain. I think of her every day. When we get a call from a mom, we think of her. The urgency is great and it's why we do what we do. We have a mom with us now, by the way, who was rescued. She was running for her life and we have her living in one apartment and she's living there with her four-year-old daughter. When she came, her daughter was sucking on a bottle and she's on the spectrum wearing a diaper. Nine weeks, she's gone from wearing a diaper to being potty trained and she can read and she's drinking out of a cup. I took them to church and she went to Sunday school and she hadn't been around children at all because mom's been trafficked.
They said she was exemplary when we picked her up. I went exemplary. My four-year-olds were never exemplary. I mean, I was like, “What job is that? She was great during Sunday school.” She sings and she dances and she skips and she's riding a tricycle. In nine weeks you go, that's what a healing environment does. The other thing we've done is mom has been taken to the hospital. We've been getting her care. It's intense. If she were any other place, they'd be separated. It provides a chance for mom to heal. If you've been trafficked at 15 and you're 32, you have a lot of healing to do. That's why it's so important. I told her, “Lashonda paved the way for you.”
Closing Words
You are incredible. All the people you are assisting are lucky to have you. I don't know if we'll ever be able to top this podcast interview with a partner organization. I'm just so happy you were able to share what your organization does so more people know about it because they should.
Look us up online and let us know what we can do to help you. If you would do me one other thing, would you send me your logo? We will feature you at our gala and do a shout-out for you.
Thank you.
Are you all local by the way?
I wish. I know.
It's like, honestly, at this point, I'm like, “Can I have a job? I want to get involved. I want to do more. Like I want to help too.”
I'd love to. If you could get to the gala, I will certainly toss that out there.
We might have to take a road trip, Jess.
I think we do love a good road trip, especially to Virginia. Those are our people.
Let me know because I'd love to honor you at it.
Episode Wrap-up
Thank you so much again. You are incredible. I know your gala will be super successful. I don't know how you're here right now. You probably have a bajillion things to do.
Seriously.
This is important. We appreciate you so much.
Thank you. I look forward to meeting you in person road trip.
Thank you again. Have a great day.
Bye.
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