Here’s the full transcript of motivational speaker Lurata Lyon‘s chat with Jane Farnham of Great British Speakers:
00:00:11:02 – 00:00:21:30
Jane Farnham
Hi, I’m Jane Farnham from Great British Speakers, and I’m here today chatting to trafficking survivor and motivational speaker Lurata Lyon. Lurata, is that the right way to pronounce your name to start off with?
00:00:22:22 – 00:00:27:45
Lurata Lyon
It is. This is a story of my life, actually, with my name, yeah. Lurata Lyon it is. Well done to you.
00:00:28:48 – 00:01:16:49
Jane Farnham
Jane is very simple. It’s very simple. I’ve never had that problem. So. Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. I’m so glad to be able to talk to you. Let me give the audience a little bit of background about you Lureta, if that’s okay. Now, I understand you were kidnapped as a teenager in Yugoslavia and you became a victim of trafficking and organ harvesting, which sounds absolutely unbelievable. Since your rescue, you’ve lived in London and Singapore, where you’ve spoken at a wide variety of events, and your experiences have been quite something. And of course, you impart that to the audiences that you speak to. So I suppose where do we start? Because that’s quite a massive thing to start off with. But I suppose let’s start with your humble beginnings in Yugoslavia. Tell us a little bit about your early life.
00:01:18:07 – 00:01:43:15
Lurata Lyon
Jane, thank you so much for having me on this amazing little show that we’ve got going on. I’m really excited and great opportunity to share this with the audience, to understand better of what goes on in the world. And no matter what life throws our way, we could always make it through. My life in Yugoslavia was one of the most magical kind of early years that I remember.
00:01:43:15 – 00:02:12:09
Lurata Lyon
I grew up with a mum that was a professor of languages and a dad that was a doctor. And my passion for becoming a doctor myself grew tremendously as I watched my dad help people and as most people wouldn’t know, but maybe as and when they read the book or listen to anything that I potentially will be speaking on, there will learn that Yugoslavia, we fought each other in war.
00:02:12:09 – 00:02:42:03
Lurata Lyon
So it wasn’t a war that took place from the outside kind of thing, but we sort of just fought each other. And it pains me to this day because you think these things don’t happen, but unfortunately they do. My biggest dream got taken away, so I never really managed to go to university and study and become a doctor like my dad or become a technical engineer as I was studying at that time, for example, and, and build cars and motorbikes or do something inventive.
00:02:42:32 – 00:03:27:01
Lurata Lyon
So all the dreams that I had as a child was shattered very, very early on, to the point where what I thought was a normal world, it became an absolute nightmare. So to bring the long story short, I’m going back to when I was 17, a town where we lived with my parents and where they were practicing there, and the doctor and my mom, being a professor, got singled out for ethnic cleansing and and so that night where we were supposed to be all dead, got saved by a miracle, and I’m not going to spoil it again, but it’s, it’s, it’s a story that must be read and hopefully you guys can find out more.
00:03:27:23 – 00:03:56:18
Lurata Lyon
But going fast forward to the trafficking. So more, more sort of more focus, kind of a subject that’s going on still in the world at large. It happened when my dad sat me down and he said, look, we clearly are based in Serbia and there is a lot of uncertainties. We almost got killed. Women are being raped and abused, children are being beaten up.
00:03:56:18 – 00:04:21:43
Lurata Lyon
He said, I can’t really watch you as my only child going through that. So he said, Do me a favor and run across the mountains into Kosovo, where the peacekeepers of the United Nations were being in the grounds where you could seek shelter, maybe the Red Cross. And I actually did sigh, exactly like I did now. And I said to my dad that I’m too scared to cross the mountains and go to the other side.
00:04:21:43 – 00:04:38:31
Lurata Lyon
I don’t even know what I’m doing or where I’m going. He said, you’ll find a way, just please do me a favor. Just go. No questions asked. Now it’s not something that you spoke about back to your dad at that time, especially, you know, we were a lot more differently raised. And I said, okay, dad, you say, i’ll go.
00:04:38:31 – 00:05:06:30
Lurata Lyon
And so I ended up in the streets of Kosovo during that time, and that same night that I reached there because it was all on foot. And with loads of struggle, I reached the capital of Kosovo only to be found in the streets by two police peacekeepers, Americans, actually. And they spotted me in distress and they got a translator with them to speak to me because I speak Serbian, but I also speak Albanian.
00:05:06:46 – 00:05:40:35
Lurata Lyon
And the reason I speak both languages as my first languages is that we were sort of based in the border with Kosovo, and Macedonian majority do speak Albanian down below on the south of Serbia. And they asked me questions and I said, Look, I’m just trying to actually get to safety. Maybe Red Cross, the two police officers there were very kind, really concerned to send me to the Red Cross at that time because I crossed borders when I wasn’t supposed to.
00:05:41:07 – 00:05:59:16
Lurata Lyon
Now, if you look at what was going on in Serbia at that time, it was bombing and shooting and it was full on war. They said, no, we can’t take it to the Red Cross just yet, but we’re going to give her shelter in a home. So it, with her permission, we can make room for her and bless them.
00:05:59:16 – 00:06:28:48
Lurata Lyon
They gave me this really nice sort of opportunity, gave me shelter in a home, and I sort of instantly felt at ease, even though I, I’ve never been with, you know, with men like that in the same environment. It was daunting. But they showed me so much respect and care that I actually instantly trust them. And I stayed with them for a while because they weren’t giving me to the Red Cross and it wasn’t on the Red Cross necessarily.
00:06:28:48 – 00:06:53:11
Lurata Lyon
It was the people and what was about to happen to me next. There were sort of on a hunt for vulnerable girls, for vulnerable children and women, and potentially men as well, especially if they’ve crossed the border. So I became part of them. I became part of their family for the next couple of months, and I was cooking for them and washing their uniforms and doing the chores.
00:06:53:11 – 00:07:17:45
Lurata Lyon
There was no language spoken. I mean, I couldn’t speak any English at all, and they couldn’t speak any Albanian or Serbian. But somehow we managed to sort of gel with each other. And I’m forever grateful for what they did for me. They risked their own safety and their own jobs just to give me that amount of time that I needed to to see what, what’s next.
00:07:18:21 – 00:07:41:11
Lurata Lyon
Unfortunately, whether somebody that maybe a translator that was with them, they gave me away, that I was with them, told someone or it was mentioned in passing, one day when they were at work, I decided to step outside of the door just to buy a magazine, to read, because there was no electricity at times and you can imagine Kosovo.
00:07:41:11 – 00:08:02:50
Lurata Lyon
I was still sort of under war, but not necessarily full blast, but still sort of rebuilding and getting their strength. And so there was no electricity, no water. I got this magazine and I thought that, you know, I’d read it. And just as I walked to buy it, actually, this big van just pulled in front of me and they dragged me into the van.
00:08:02:51 – 00:08:28:10
Lurata Lyon
And these were the organ harvesting and sex trafficking of that time in Kosovo. And they said, we’ve got her. We’ve got you know, they called me names and I’m like, this is not happening to me because they’ve put this black thing over my head. And they just dragged me into the van. That was really quite frightening. And I wish somebody would pinch me so I could wake up.
00:08:28:10 – 00:08:48:30
Lurata Lyon
And it was all a nightmare. It was one of those things. And then they took me for a while. They groomed me. They realized I was still a virgin. And I don’t really want to spoil too much about the story, but just to give the listeners a little bit of background, what’s to come next? Where I was on the solitary confinement.
00:08:48:30 – 00:09:25:42
Lurata Lyon
So having been taken and abused and groomed and then ready to be sold and the deal didn’t go through, I managed to escape them. It left me really vulnerable and I was forced to go back to Serbia. And when I actually finally reached Serbia, my parents were in hiding and the whole town was like a ghost town. And within minutes of reaching my home, this big van entered our gate and it was army forces which were wearing trainers at that time.
00:09:25:42 – 00:09:58:48
Lurata Lyon
And this identified the numbers that were recruited from prisons. So people potentially they’ve done crimes, were recruited to make the numbers as army servants, but they wore trainers and the regular army wore boots and they wore facial masks and the normal army didn’t. And so it was unfortunately, it was the guys with the trainers and the masks that took me that particular night from my parents home with my mum screaming in the middle of the garden and crying.
00:09:58:48 – 00:10:17:00
Lurata Lyon
And I said, Mum, it’s okay. You know, I wanted to say to her, Mum, you don’t know what’s happened to me in Kosovo. I never got to tell you, I’ll be okay this time. This is legit. Hopefully this is very legit and I can just reason with these guys and tell them the truth and they will return me back to my parents.
00:10:17:00 – 00:10:36:40
Lurata Lyon
And that was just so wishful thinking in so many levels and such naive way of thinking that you. It’s funny how we think that certain things mean something like, I saw uniform and I thought it was going to be legit in my eyes, but it wasn’t. So on.
00:10:37:08 – 00:10:39:39
Jane Farnham
[Inaudible]
00:10:40:44 – 00:11:07:03
Lurata Lyon
Yeah, this was in Serbia where we lived. It was the army that was created. And so they took me and I was imprisoned in Serbia in a illegal, abandoned building in a small room which if you were to lie down, the walls could reach each other. And as wide as maybe you just open one arm and then if you stood up, you could feel the ceiling almost on your head and there was no window.
00:11:07:31 – 00:11:23:15
Lurata Lyon
It was just damp and cold and there was only one blanket and just as I was. But when, when we reached this building, they interrogated me and they. Why did you cross borders from Kosovo? Why did you go there? Are you a spy?
00:11:23:36 – 00:11:24:00
Jane Farnham
Oh.
00:11:24:27 – 00:11:48:55
Lurata Lyon
And all these questions. And this is going on at the age of 17. And I was like, This is something I watched in the movies, you know, Hollywood movies. This is not happening to me, surely. But it was happening. So they abused me. Jane, so much to the point where they branded one of my legs with a metal, hot metal sort of, they’ve created it just to, to, to get information out of people.
00:11:48:55 – 00:12:14:33
Lurata Lyon
I guess I wasn’t the only one they’d done it to. They, they split one of my ears. In fact, I had to have it reconstructed in the UK from punching my face and kicking, I mean, dislocated my jaw, I broke my nose. They literally yanked my back and I’ve got constant chronic pain on my back, which almost left me disabled, almost got paralyzed, actually.
00:12:15:43 – 00:12:51:12
Lurata Lyon
So all of these little sort of things that you might think, you know, how, how could somebody, how could somebody find it in themselves to project so much anger against another human being or any living being? How could this exist in us? And that was my question on that, on those times when I was with them for six months in this small little room, it was dark and it was dingy, and I was obviously physically abused.
00:12:52:10 – 00:13:17:52
Lurata Lyon
If I even can can say it on a video, I was raped daily and abused psychologically with rats and mice being put in my room and psychological games that they played with me from dragging me out, from washing me, spraying me with cold water, hot water, beating me, brushing my hair one minute, giving me love next minute, really tormenting me.
00:13:17:52 – 00:13:40:26
Lurata Lyon
And I went into really dark, dark, dark kind of mental state. I thought it was, I gave in literally, I gave in because I thought, you know, you can’t, how much more of this can someone handle?
00:13:40:26 – 00:14:02:42
Jane Farnham
I just can’t even begin to imagine what you went through in that solitary confinement. I mean, how did that experience come to an end? So you were rescued. And then I suppose the next question is, well, how do you come back and make your way back physically and emotionally from that? Mentally? It’s, I just don’t know how you go about doing that.
00:14:04:01 – 00:14:26:24
Lurata Lyon
Well, I sort of you know, what I always say to the listeners and the clients, we are really not born with skills. No one is born with skills, but we are born with instinct. And that instinct, what kept me going in those darkest moments, physically and mentally, was the instinct to make it through. So I can tell my parents, I can make them proud.
00:14:26:24 – 00:14:51:14
Lurata Lyon
Hopefully they still alive and I can make them proud. And the other one was that it wasn’t for them to break what nature created, which was me, us. It wasn’t theirs to break. It was my decision to make whether I get broken or I get made from it. So the, the biggest lessons that they taught me, in fact made me. Once I was rescued.
00:14:51:14 – 00:15:18:46
Lurata Lyon
And that could be found a lot more in details with the book when it’s published eventually soon, is that I was flown, I was flown, I was taken straight into the UK soil and this is where I was, a political asylum seeker. And the British government is actually, if I may thank them right now. If anyone from the government is listening, or come across this.
00:15:19:08 – 00:15:55:31
Lurata Lyon
I would like to thank them because without the opportunity, the second chance in life that I was given, I would never be who I am today. And I will not be able to help people that I have helped and I will in the future at value. So yeah. Political refugee in the UK was. Yeah, I thought it went, you know people think when you escape or make it through a traumatizing event you think your, your stress or your mental health and everything that you would face through depressions, whatever he might be, it stops.
00:15:55:31 – 00:16:34:40
Lurata Lyon
But unfortunately sometimes post-traumatic and you come into sort of safety, everything just comes flooding in and you haven’t, you haven’t made it through yet. It’s a long journey. And as long as people recognize it then, yes, you can make it through to the other side. But don’t ignore the signs of need to be dealing with still whatever it might be, emotional or physical like for me, with my dislocated back and many injuries and also mental state, which I needed to work on so, so much and so many factors took place for me to even be able to help myself.
00:16:35:13 – 00:16:47:49
Lurata Lyon
But it all started with the British government by giving me the psychiatrist or giving me a safe place to stay and giving me the food and giving me the opportunity to study. So yeah, big things.
00:16:48:12 – 00:17:11:16
Jane Farnham
Yeah. And obviously that’s fantastic, but obviously it comes from within. I mean, there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t have been able to turn things around quite the way you have. So how did you get involved in speaking? Because this is clearly a very traumatic experience. When did the speaking start? How did that happen? Because obviously I would have imagined you probably spent a long time healing before you were even able to do that.
00:17:12:25 – 00:17:33:05
Lurata Lyon
It’s funny, actually I went the other way round, Jane. I didn’t even go into healing. I actually wanted to. I realized that whatever happened to me happened, and I needed to move on. I needed to survive. I needed to make something of myself, whether study or work or whatever it might be. And it all started with personal training.
00:17:33:05 – 00:17:59:00
Lurata Lyon
I found exercising was making me feel better. And because I felt better and my emotions and overall mental health felt better during that exercise period, I thought, Why don’t I study to become a personal trainer and help others? And so and the reason I’m telling you this story is because it’s all linked to why I started to speak. As I was training people and I was fully involved in their everyday life.
00:17:59:00 – 00:18:21:48
Lurata Lyon
I was traveling with them. I ended up not feeling my legs at one point, and this is one thing that I neglected. It was my back. After they dislocated my back, I sort of thought, Well, I can walk, I’m in pain, but I’m fine. I wasn’t fine and around 2006 I was so bad that the surgeons in the UK said, you’re going to lose your legs.
00:18:22:10 – 00:18:38:47
Lurata Lyon
So we suggest if you’re going to have children, anything, you do it now because you’re not going to be able to look after your children. And that really hit me hard. And then I had to restructure my whole life. I had to think, okay, well, what is it that I could do that doesn’t involve such a physical job.
00:18:39:28 – 00:18:58:37
Lurata Lyon
And so I was thinking, sitting down, having a coffee with one of my mentors, Jeel, and telling him that I no longer can look after him and I cannot really train him and or his family. And he sat across the table. He told me a story about himself. I don’t know. I don’t know why he opened up to me in that sense.
00:18:59:06 – 00:19:22:35
Lurata Lyon
And then I felt that obligation for the first time to tell someone my story and I so I told Jeel and Jeel was stunned. And he’s just like, Lurata, you don’t you don’t even realize what you just said, unlike what he said. You know, you said you love doing charity, right? I said, Yeah. I said, you know how much you could help people and raise funds and, and sharing.
00:19:22:37 – 00:19:47:07
Lurata Lyon
He said, You can’t be selfish and keep this to yourself. I said, Jeel, I’m embarrassed what happened to me? I can just go in the world and tell people and who cares what happened to me? I’m going to do my own thing. No, I said, my dear, you first need to learn to public speak and then publish a book and then use the book as a product for yourself to support yourself, of course, but also to raise funds for the charity.
00:19:47:07 – 00:20:04:13
Lurata Lyon
As he said, the book will allow you to really open up so many doors and it all sort of seemed so daunting. But I listened to him and I signed myself up to become a public speaking coach, and that’s all I wanted to do. I thought, I’ll just do the coaching, but wasn’t sure I was to share my story.
00:20:04:46 – 00:20:32:55
Lurata Lyon
And then lo and behold, when I graduated from Public Speaker’s University, I did this big speech to everyone and I used my storytelling because storytelling is part of actual public speaking to engage with the audience. And I didn’t realize how much I touched everyone in that audience and everyone, the students, everyone stood up and start clapping and coming afterwards, giving me a hug and still crying as it was.
00:20:33:05 – 00:20:43:35
Lurata Lyon
I was so overwhelmed and I thought, Gosh, maybe I should be, you know, sharing this with everyone because you just never know who is going to reach. And so yeah.
00:20:43:53 – 00:21:05:15
Jane Farnham
So, so yeah, so you, so you obviously got a huge amount of that experience, which is, I can see visibly from you. So in terms of a corporate audience, when you do go out and you publicly speak now for companies, what are the key topics that you give your audiences? What do you think, what takeaways can you give them?
00:21:06:23 – 00:21:29:09
Lurata Lyon
Well, firstly, I focus on mental health. It has been such a, especially now more than ever, after everything we’ve had with, the world has had a universal experience with what has just happened in the last few years. And I think I found most of my clients have reached out to me on mental health issue and keeping that, people happy working from home.
00:21:29:33 – 00:21:58:19
Lurata Lyon
And so mental health is, sometimes is used quite lightly, but actually is something that needs to be addressed with and helped with. Resilience is one of those and, you know, diversity and just a few things. It depends what the client wants. I think from the experience I’ve had and also the experience work wise and personally, I can tailor make it to the client’s needs.
00:21:58:46 – 00:22:32:04
Lurata Lyon
But my takeaways would be that, you know, you firstly learn to see good in everyone. I say, if we could see everyone’s insecurity that they are born with despite of what they’ve become or you know what’s how they are towards you, we will always see good in everyone. So learn to oversee what’s in front of you and try and learn to see what’s good. Secondly if we create the problem to be bigger than it is.
00:22:32:04 – 00:23:01:13
Lurata Lyon
So whether it’s something at work that they’re facing, perhaps a deal hasn’t gone through or maybe they feel like they’re not in the right environment where they work or whatever it might be, instead of panicking and and making a big deal, I always suggest to relook at all the goods and not mention any bads. So take a note and line up all the goods that are there within what you are doing, what you’ve achieved so far.
00:23:01:37 – 00:23:27:59
Lurata Lyon
Because once we focus on the bad, the bad is so much stronger than the good. And we will learn that all the time. And the other thing is that you could go through anything, and you really can make it through no matter how the time can look really narrow and dark and long. It’s all within us. We choose to make that tunnel really dark and long, or we can replace it with light.
00:23:28:33 – 00:23:48:52
Lurata Lyon
I was in a dark room, but I always saw light because I will, you know, visualizing. So visualizing things will help us to attract what we want in the world, what we attract on us. Yeah. So, I mean, there is so many takeaways, but it’s just gone on and on about it.
00:23:48:59 – 00:24:02:51
Jane Farnham
It’s such an inspirational story. I mean, I absolutely take my hat off to you sitting here today and telling us about it in such detail and we’ve kind of run out of time. But just tell me about your book. What are you hoping to get that released?
00:24:03:45 – 00:24:35:58
Lurata Lyon
Well, the book has been all written and ready to go. It has been sent to some really big publishers in the States as we speak. I haven’t shared it with anyone in the UK, but we are waiting. It’s on, definitely in front of the right people and just fingers crossed we’ve already had a lot of interest in doing a documentary and also a film potentially because human trafficking is one of the biggest sort of businesses in the world, with 150 million people being trafficked all the time.
00:24:35:58 – 00:25:03:14
Lurata Lyon
But the book is more to do with the fact that resilience really is not about feeling sorry for me or pointing fingers. It’s more about whoever reads it from reviews that I’ve had from people hearing me speak the entire story. They find their strength to carry on or accomplish things, whether there’s a marathon they want to reach, their goals at work or whatever it might be, so it encourages them to think otherwise.
00:25:04:03 – 00:25:10:49
Jane Farnham
Good luck with the book. Do you keep us posted on when it’s released. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us your story.
00:25:11:34 – 00:25:13:30
Lurata Lyon
Thank you, Jane. It’s been a pleasure.
00:25:14:09 – 00:25:26:15
Jane Farnham
Well, it’s been brilliant chatting to you. And if you’d like to book Lurata, simply contact myself or Steve at Great British Speakers on 01753439289 or you can email bookings at bookings@greatbritishtalent.com.
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Lurata Lyon, motivational speaker at Great British Speakers
