When Eric Ensey traveled to India this year, he shook the hand of a man who was freed from bonded labor by the money his teenage students had raised in Sammamish.

"If you hadn't helped us," the Indian millworker told the American middle-school teacher, "we would have died in the rice mill."

Fundraisers for charity are a staple of school life, but Ensey and his students have taken that work in an unusual direction by raising tens of thousands of dollars to help free enslaved people, many living half a world away.

(Continue Reading in Seattle Times)

Photo courtesy of Sun Star