As a student at St. Lawrence University and current president of the InterVarsity chapter there, Marilyn expresses her compassion by working to eliminate human trafficking and showing her campus that God cares about justice. Marilyn, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Mexico in their early twenties, grew up in Huntington Park, California. I was hungry to learn as much as I could. Lawrence, despite its faraway location in Canton, New York.
Once she landed on campus, God directed Marilyn to InterVarsity, where she got involved and began serving the chapter through simple tasks, such as making announcements at the large group meeting. InterVarsity quickly became a safe community for Marilyn, supporting her as she has developed as a Christian. She brought the Human Wrong campaign , an initiative of the humanitarian aid organization World Vision, to St.
The Human Wrong campaign seeks to help college students raise their awareness of child slavery and speak out against it on campus. At St. Lawrence, the initiative spanned two weeks, with one week focused on raising awareness and the other focused on raising money. The InterVarsity chapter showed films, held demonstrations, and collected signatures to help pass anti-slavery legislation.
The culminating event was a panel of professors, counselors and researchers from the university discussing the effects of human trafficking. These events gave St. Lawrence students a new understanding of the realities of human traffickingβbut the events also brought a new understanding of what InterVarsity was all about. But Human Wrong changed all that. During the spring of , she studied abroad in Vienna, Austria, where prostitution is legal.
Marilyn volunteered with Herz Werk Heart Work , a nonprofit that offers support and counseling to women in prostitution. Although not all of these women are trafficked, many of them are, and the volunteers of Herz Work visit, pray with, and provide resources for them all.
