We were warned about so much, and they are legitimate and fair warnings. However, why wasn’t I warned that the people of this country were going to steal my heart? Why wasn’t I warned that I was going to fall in love with the Thai culture, the Thai people, and everyone who lives and works at our ministry site?!?! I tried to prepare for so much coming into the country, and I was still caught off-guard!!
It’s unbelievable here! I absolutely love Thailand. This month is unique in that all of the men of our squad are serving together in Chiang Mai at a ministry called Remember Nhu. We are doing a lot of manual labor and developing relationships. We arrive at the site between 6:45 and 8:00 AM and are usually done by noon because the temperatures exceed 100 degrees pretty much every day. We’ve been digging a trench for a water line, trimming banana trees, moving branches and rocks, and cutting bamboo to repair some of their buildings. We have the afternoon off each day to rest and then go back and eat dinner and spend time with the girls.
I wish you could meet them. You wouldn’t last 10 seconds before you fell in love!! The ministry is a home for 30 girls (ages 7-17) who were all taken in because they were likely candidates to be sold by their families into the sex slave trade. The director said that 9 out of 10 of these girls would currently be slaves in a brothel if Remember Nhu hadn’t offered them a scholarship to live there, go to school, and be a part of a Christian community. There are many reasons why they were likely candidates to be sold into slavery. The girls are either orphans, abandoned, have a sibling or parent who “works” in the sex slave trade, parents who do drugs or are in prison, or parents who are too poor to take care of them. Most of their families do not want to sell them, but it’s driven by poverty. Their parents know it’s one of the few ways to get money here in Thailand when you’re poor. Selling their young daughter’s virginity to a man or selling them outright to be a prostitute in a brothel is going to get them a lot of money. 
That is why a ministry like Remember Nhu is so important. It gives the people who were going to sell the girls another option. Instead of having their virginity taken away from them as children and trying to repay a debt to a pimp that the pimp will never allow to be repaid, they now are in a loving Christian community, are going to school, and have a ministry who will support them through college or until they have mastered a skill or trade to be able to provide themselves an income.
In case you don’t know much about the human trafficking or the sex slave trade industry, I wanted to help make you aware of how huge this is. As an illegal industry, the amount of money generated is second only to the sale of weapons. 1.2 million children enter this 
industry each year. The youngest girl in the industry in 1997 was 17 years old. In 2003, the youngest girl was 3. One of the main reasons for young girls being in it is because many Asians believe having sex with a virgin will cure the man of AIDS. Girls who enter into it before the age of 18 have a 90% chance of dying of AIDS. The industry really took off in Bangkok during the Vietnam War because many US soldiers were looking for prostitutes. Finally, 50% of the men who fly into the Bangkok airport are here for the girls/women.
So there it is. The injustice is obvious, but those fighting against it are few. It has been an absolute joy to spend time with these girls, and I don’t even want to think about how they’d be spending their nights if the Lord hadn’t offered them another option through this ministry. It’s been amazing to let them teach me how to count in Thai, play bocce ball, worship the Lord, and share tons of laughs together. I already know it’s going to be tough to say goodbye in a couple weeks, but I’m so thankful that the tough goodbye is because of how special these girls are.
