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Oceanne’s Pearls tells the story of how wealthy philanthropy gone astray created an epic saga of beautiful disaster, illicit motive, and “feel good” HEG adventures.
This work is the first of its kind to be born from the technology at our sides. These trafficked women were obsessed about using their phones to record every meaningful moment of their lives. Their transcribed letters allow you to literally walk hand in hand on the girl’s path from helplessness to hope.
They started out in 2015 as hopeless victims living in a sanctuary for trafficked girls in Paris. This is where a miracle occurred that transformed 36 trafficked women into a force of hope that created the hundreds of inspirational letters for you to read.
Oceanne's Pearls is a five part series of the lives in letters of these warrior angels who went on to fight on the front lines of human trafficking. They span three short years through the battles these girls fought to rescue over 1200 victims in 14 nations.
When I was approached at the end of a long line of failed attempts to help these three dozen women, I was at a total loss. What could I possibly do to help them that the experience of trained trauma experts hadn't already tried? I am a college professor, a teacher of teachers. My specialty is educating young children, not women whose childhoods were ripped away from them.
Falling back on my past, I looked across the vast array of textbooks that held the most prevailing theories on how to teach others to best mold and shape the minds of growing children. However to my mind ‘formal’ doctrines of any kind were exactly what failed these girls.
It was then that my eyes drifted to a shelf that contained books that rarely find a place in the academic world, books I used early in my career. Their bright colors and simple titles represented the whimsical thoughts and dreams that shepherd every step in our adult lives.
Nothing could replace what these girls lost; but, what if I could give them something they never knew before, something no one could ever take from them again, something that shapes our empathy of life.
So I read them children's stories: stories that sparked emotions to fill their deep emptiness, stories that miraculously took root in the dark soil of their tortured memories to push their demons into the light.
In three years these girls filled over six reams of lifeless paper with the hopes and dreams that color the battles all women face in life. After they died, we were asked to preserve their stories as a testament of how they learned to fight for each other, learned to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves, so we could learn to save... us.
We are all stories in the end that began with our first steps into the whimsy paved with children’s stories. Starting with less than nothing, these girls became the pebbles in the “Stone Soup” that nourished others to do the same. It is this same nothing the girls wished us to us share with all the downtrodden souls of this earth, hope.
Jane Leatherman Ph.D.
(Known to the girls as "Beatrice")
Through LeAna’s vast network of fashion and marketing assets across the globe, she provided human trafficking intelligence to Interpol, Europol, FBI and many other police organizations. She traded this information for access to trafficked girls to create a clandestine sanctuary she hoped would provide a force she could turn against the very traffickers who enslaved her as a teenage model.
Even though LeAna used her influence to enlist the best trauma therapist across Europe, the girls proved recalcitrant to almost every method of therapy and rehabilitation. Eventually after almost a decade of failed efforts to help them, she resigned herself to simply care for these girls, as others cared for her after her abduction.
Inspired by a woman doing volunteer work for the Red Cross involving children who have special needs, LeAna enlisted Beatrice to work with the girls. She also transferred one of her most precious assets, Oceanne, who she used to develop business strategies for her most troublesome influential clients.
Together Beatrice and Oceanne discovered a never before tried method of therapy which made amazing inroads to supplant the girls' intense emotional trauma and give them back the childhoods that were stolen from them.
When word reached traffickers that the girls were finally making progress toward achieving LeAna’s vicarious goal of revenge, the LeAna’s Light sanctuary was attacked on April 1, 2016 by mercenaries sent to murder the girls and put an end to her vengeful pursuit. Ironically for the traffickers, this assault was the spark that ended up turning the tide and inspiring these remarkable women to bring the fight against human trafficking right to their doorstep.
Jane is a published textbook author and professor of education at Purdue University specializing in special education.
Vita of Jane M. Leatherman Ph.D
Jane Leatherman Purdue University Page
Dean is an independent researcher with 27 US patents. He is also an artist, soloist, photographer and videographer.
"I met Alisha over 30 years ago on the day she turned 13. She was visiting America for the first time with her mother and unbeknownst to me was planning to throw herself off an overpass bridge into holiday traffic before I cared enough become involved. The events of that day are a story for Alisha to tell. However, thirty years later she once again sought me out to tell me of how that day changed not only her life, but allowed her to go on and help others - the girls of LeAna's Light. In remembrance of how we first met, she asked us to bring their story to you."
https://www.linkedin.com/in/russel-dean-leatherman-6562b217b/
One of the last things I remember was seeing the light from a window fall through her paper thin dress. Ella was fidgeting with the buttons as her hands slowly exposed her navel.
Through the shadows of the dress pattern, I saw Ella had drawn symbols all over her body, markings that peaked out but were still hidden.
Ella knew what I wanted as my morbid curiosity struggled to switch on a desk lamp. Slowly she turned towards the light and parted the front of her dress to reveal the secrets beneath.
I looked up as Ella mumbled, but her lips weren’t moving. I realized it was I who was softly speaking in strange inspired tongues.
When her dress fell to the floor, the truth of the Crucible Battle was revealed. Ella was covered with the notes coroners make on body diagrams to document the dead – the location and severity of wounds, the cause of death.
Naked Ella looked almost messianic like she had been perfectly carved from pale marble. Flowing over the surface and valleys of her body were notations of unbelievable horror. Beside each mortal wound were the names of our daughters.
I fell to the floor as she began to speak, “My sisters are all gone now, resting deep in mother earth, undying spirits that on the third day will rise again.”
