The Chains Your Coffee Is Breaking
There are over 20,000 brick kilns operating in Pakistan right now. Inside them, millions of men, women, and children are working to pay off debts they may never escape. Some of those debts aren’t even their own.
A System Designed to Keep You In
Imagine borrowing $1,000 in a moment of desperation — a medical emergency, a family funeral, a wedding you couldn’t afford — and then spending the next 20 years trying to pay it back.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the reality for an estimated 3.5 to 4.5 million people currently trapped in Pakistan’s brick kiln industry.
The system is called *peshgi* — an advance loan from the kiln owner that comes attached to a condition: you work for me until the debt is cleared. The problem? The debt almost never gets cleared. Wages are kept intentionally low. Interest compounds. And if you fall sick, miss a day, or need another advance, the number climbs higher. By design.
The history of brick kiln slavery in Pakistan is long and persistent, rooted in centuries-old systems of debt bondage and social hierarchy. Entire family units are forced to work — women bring newborn children to the kilns — and the debt is passed down through generations.
To put it plainly: children are born into slavery they had no part in creating.
Who Is Most Vulnerable?
Pakistan officially banned bonded labor in 1992. The law is real. The enforcement is not.
Despite religious minorities making up only about 5% of Pakistan’s population, their representation in brick kilns is often as high as 50%, particularly in Punjab and Sindh provinces. Christians, scheduled-caste Hindus, and other marginalized communities are funneled into the kilns because they have the fewest options and the least legal protection.
Al Jazeera has reported that almost 70% of bonded laborers in Pakistan are children, making up more than one-third of the four million people working in brick kilns. Often, these children work all day and are denied any access to education.
Families work 12 to 14 hours a day. Work begins before sunrise. Men dig clay. Women and children mix it with water, standing knee-deep in mud under a sun that superheats the air. The process is deliberately designed to require an entire family’s labor.
This is not a labor dispute. This is modern slavery — generational, systematic, and largely hidden from the rest of the world.
Why This Matters to Us
When we named this company Ten Boom Coffee, we weren’t reaching for a clever brand name. We were making a declaration.
Corrie ten Boom hid Jewish families in her home in Nazi-occupied Holland — not because it was safe, but because it was right. She looked at suffering and chose not to look away. Her family paid dearly for that choice. And yet her story — and the faith that fueled it — has outlasted the regime that tried to silence it.
We built Ten Boom Coffee around that same conviction: that goodness should be active. That a business can be more than a transaction. That a morning cup of coffee can be the thread that connects your kitchen in America to a family’s freedom in Pakistan.
From the beginning, we’ve committed 10% of every sale — not profit, every sale — to life-protecting causes. Not as a marketing line. As a baseline.
Our partnership with Global Christian Relief is one of the ways that commitment takes shape.
What GCR Is Doing
Global Christian Relief has been visiting these kiln communities, meeting with families, and working directly to break the chains of generational debt. Their president and CEO, Brian Orme, has said: “When we handed over those checks to families like Raheel and Ruth, we weren’t just freeing them from debt — we were breaking generational chains of bondage.”
Here’s what makes GCR’s approach different: they don’t just pay a debt and walk away.
GCR’s Blueprint for Freedom doesn’t stop at the kiln gate. Through trusted partners on the ground in Pakistan, freed families are helped to launch micro-businesses that can support them, and receive financial training to help ensure they never return to debt.
A $1,018 loan can trap a family in a lifetime of slavery. That same amount — $1,018 — can free them. GCR’s supporters have already freed over 250 families from bonded labor in Pakistan, with 100% of gifts going directly toward helping impoverished families trapped in the brick kilns.
This year, Global Christian Relief aims to free 500 families from kiln slavery — double last year’s number.
One cup at a time, Ten Boom Coffee is part of making that possible.
What You Can Do
When you buy a bag of Ten Boom Coffee, you’re not just getting specialty-grade beans roasted in Lewisburg, Tennessee.
You’re funding a movement.
You’re saying that a Christian family in Punjab shouldn’t have to shape 2,000 bricks a day for a debt they didn’t create. You’re saying that a child should have a classroom, not a kiln. You’re saying that freedom matters — not as an abstraction, but as something worth spending $18 on.
Brew a legacy. Be a ten Boom.
Every purchase. Every cup. Every morning — there’s goodness brewing.
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To learn more about Global Christian Relief’s work in Pakistan, visit globalchristianrelief.org. To shop Ten Boom Coffee and support this work directly, click here.
