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"I'm struggling to end slavery because I know how I suffered," said Helia Lajeunesse, a former restavèk, child slave, who is now a children's rights advocate. Today, there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, according to the research of Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves. This is more than at any time in history, even including during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In Haiti, the only nation ever to host a successful slave revolution, 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced and usually violent servitude in a system known as restavèk, literally "to stay with." The numbers are at risk of rising dramatically because of the hundreds of thousands of children who lost their parents or were abandoned after the earthquake

“The space of play and the space of thought are the two theaters of freedom.”  -- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Rosenstock-Huessy was a German army officer in World War I, afterward a professor of medieval law in Breslau until the Nazis acquired the franchise in 1933. Signed for the next year’s season by Harvard University to teach undergraduates the rudiments of Western civilization, he soon noticed that few of them grasped what he was trying to say, couldn’t square the lines of thought with the circle of their emotions. To overcome the difficulties the professor recast his lectures in the idiom of sports and games, the only world, he said, “in which the American student really has confidence… this world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affections and interests.”