It can be difficult or very,very easy. Men fly into Chiang Mai from all over the Western world for one reason. They want to have sex with a prostitute. It seems simple enough. When you walk into the Thai Kickboxing ring surrounded by bars where Thai women await purchase, the music beats into your chest and the colors of all the lights overwhelms you. The women are all exceptionally beautiful and beckon at you to come into their bar. It doesn’t matter if you are a girl or boy, young or old. They smile and laugh and even seem to enjoy the gropes of the much older men that seem to dominate the kickboxing ring, until you catch a glace of their eyes. Many look so hard, so old, so sad, and so weary. If you really pay attention you can see one take a deep breath to pull herself together before approaching a potential customer. You can see subtle resistance as their humanity is chipped away little by little each time they are looked over like a piece of merchandise and sold like an object.
It costs $400 Thai Baht to cover a girl’s bar fee for the night (equivalent to about $20USD) and several thousand more to do whatever you want with her for the rest of the night. I can tell you not one of them enjoy it. They will smile because it is their job. They will laugh because if they don’t their family may not eat the next day. If you ask her if she likes it, she will look at you a moment and then quietly say, “no.”
Many of these girls are my age, and so similar to me in so many ways…so normal. I ask God many times why it is not me in these bars. I am a white American female. I will not be sold by my parents into sex slavery. I will never have to dig through the garbage to find food. I will never have to sell my body to feed my children. I will never have to beg on the streets or watch my family be killed by my country's government and I have grown up always knowing that Jesus loves me. Why me?
I still don’t have an answer for this, but I know that I have been blessed by God with an incredible and rich life, and I know that I have a lot of responsibility that goes along with all of this. I know that God did not make too many people and not enough resources to feed them all. I know that He did not intend for sex to be the most profitable industry in the world, and that he did not create so many children that there are not enough people to take care of them all. We are all here to do God’s work and He demands this of us over and over again in the Bible.
There are many ways to do this. I have felt called to the World Race for a year where I feel that I am being prepared for what it to come later on down the road. I am so grateful for all that God has allowed me to see and for all of the lives here that have touched me. I hope that in some small way I can shine a little of His light of hope in these dark places.
“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
-William Wilberforce
