Wow, I haven’t written a blog all month…so now you are going to get overloaded! ENJOY 🙂
It has been a wonderful month! I have been here in Phuket, Thailand with 3 other teams working with SHE (Self Help and Empowerment) ministries. SHE ministries empowers women to get out of the bars and the sex industry and into different sustainable jobs. They have already helped 150 women get out industry in only a few years. There are over 200 open bars on Bangla road, Patong, where we did our outreach every night. Patong is a huge tourist area and every night we saw people of every age from all over the world. It was a very eye-opening experience which made my heart hurt. I hated to see the women enslaved in this and also to see the tourists observe and take part as if nothing was wrong. We had to be careful ourselves to not become desensitized to the things we became familiar with.
Wow, I knew I would be doing this from the moment I signed up for the World Race but I didn’t really know what to expect. I was nervous and scared of what I might see in the bars and also that I wouldn’t know how to help the women who are trapped in the sex trade. Only the team leaders and squad leaders went out to the bars our first night. We went to the bars in groups of 3 and just simply talked to the women who were working there. We were there to offer them a way out and to show them Christ’s love. I was able to talk to some of the women, but many of the women knew very little english. We were also able to offer english lessons and just recently SHE is starting to provide hotel training. If any of the women wanted to pack their bags and leave the bars for good that night we were able to take them back to SHE. Many of the women we spoke with had only worked at the bars for a couple of months and we also met one who had just started that day.
I quite enjoyed bar ministry. All of the women loved to talk with us and they were very open about their lives. Most of the women I spoke with were in their 30’s and were only there to make money to send back to their families. They all had children who lived with their parents in other parts of Thailand. Most of the women I spoke with did not like working there, but did it solely for money. My favourite part of bar ministry was just meeting and speaking with all the girls so that they could recieve proper attention and not the attention they are used to.
