Days. They begin like any other; wake up, talk to Jesus, eat your breakfast, and then go on your way. To church, to work, to ministry, to sit home and blog. Anything, everything. It’s just like every other day back home.
Sometimes you get weekends off, sometimes you’re doing the night shift. Sometimes you won’t be able to get work off on your birthday, because you know what? It happens. Life happens. Just like back home.
We spend our time in relationships. All over the place we are in relationships. With each other, with our bosses (our ministry contacts), with our leaders, with the cute guy making our coffee. Sometimes it’s the monk we come across, or the homeless man, or the little barefoot boy down the street. Relationships. Everyday. Everywhere. It’s real life. Just like it is back home.
We get sick too. We get a cold, or the flu. We spend time at clinics getting blood drawn, and we wait for results. Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s something more. But we’re all usually okay in the end. Our body heals; God heals. Just like back home.
We have real emotions. We get mad and sad. We’re happy one moment and crying the next. We’re missionaries, but we’re people just like you. Real people living real lives. You know, just like back home.
But we aren’t in America any longer, and I see that every day I’m on the Race. Every single day I’m reminded that I’m not home. I am so far from home.
Cars honk. Literally everywhere. Dogs bark and squeal and are beaten right in front of you. It’s the noise we fall asleep to at night.
Strange smells, often nausea-inducing, are normal.
We ride in things called tuk-tuks through a tangled web of mazes called streets.
Stoplights are more of a guideline than a rule, and 100 motos try to cross an intersection at the same time, all in a hurry to go to different places and in different directions. And sometimes we get stuck in that traffic and just sit there, and we see things we wish weren’t real.
Five women wearing short shorts and form fitting black tanks. Their make-up is done, and high heels adorn their feet. Sitting on stools inside of a brothel, they wait. I stare from my seat in a tuk-tuk, unable to pry my eyes from what was certainly occurring, and I pray. ” Papa, they are so young. So beautiful. What brought them here?” The girls chat very casually with each other, always looking out toward the street, never seeing the whites of each other’s eyes.
Out walks a man as casual as can be, as if he was walking out of a coffee shop, and he goes on his way down the street. One of the women on the stools looks at his back with disgust, a sure sign that she wants out. Less than a minute later, a young woman walks into the scene, slightly disheveled but mostly put together, and hands a key to a woman behind the desk. She turns and walks out of the picture, only to return a few moments later, dressed just as the other girls are: high heels, make-up done and coifed hair, short shorts and a form fitting black tank. She finds her place on a stool, and waits.
A single tear drips from my eye as our tuk-tuk moves on and we leave the women on the stools behind and another red light fades away as we drive off into the distance.
Two minutes. All of that happened while we sat in traffic for two minutes. I saw a brothel in action while stuck in traffic. With my eyes I saw it. I saw it.
This is where the World Race is so different from other parts of life. It’s so much more heart-wrenching than my life back home. Even though it exists all over the States, you don’t see it unless you go looking for it.
Here, you don’t have a choice but to see….
…here you don’t live without seeing.
