Hello from Chiang Mai, Thailand! I've been loving it here. We live in the heart of the city. There's so many shops and things going on all the time. The first three days were spent learning cultural things about Thailand and about the different things that the ministry does. We learned about some of the customs and taboos in Thailand along with information about Buddhism. The ministry here does three different things. One is that they have a coffee shop that will purposely hire former prostitutes or women who haven't had good job opportunities, and some in my squad are working at the coffee shop and mentoring the women there. Side note- we live above the coffee shop in a nice house with a ton of stairs, and it gets so hot and humid, it's like in the 80's where we are right now. Another thing that the ministry does that some in my squad are doing is working in some of the nearby slums and also going to the "monk chats" which the Buddhist monks set up to learn English better. The thing that my team is doing is the bar ministry. The bars in Chiang Mai are different from America because they all have prostitutes or women to entertain the men, and they're filled with a lot of old, grandpa-looking men from Europe/America/Australia. Even though the bars have prostitutes, the atmosphere feels a lot calmer and even safer than most American bars, but maybe it's because we leave pretty early. We've been told that there is sex slavery that goes on, and that it's common for women to be sold by their parents as girls to make money for the family. However, we were told that it is more common for a woman to be there by ''choice'' because she doesn't have much other job opportunities. I've talked to a few of the women there, and it seems that they do it to provide for their families and many times they have kids and sometimes a husband. I asked if Buddhism was against prostitution, and it is against it from what I understand. I feel blessed and happy to have this opportunity because I feel that it is significant work, and also because my team's the only team that gets to work in the bars this month.
We started going to the bars on Tuesday. We've been praying and worshipping most of the day, and then getting dressed up and going out to the bars at about 8pm and then coming back at about 10:30pm. This first week we've just been meeting people and not talking about Jesus or religion or being missionaries unless they bring it up or ask us specifically. There's 6 women on my team including me, and we each have a partner when we go out, so we have 3 groups, and 2 of our groups go out at night while 1 group stays back and prays. We switch off every night. We've been purchasing non-alcoholic drinks and offering to buy non-alcoholic drinks for the women that work there too. Our hopes are that we'll be able to build relationships, share the gospel and truth, meet up with some of them in the day time, and see some of the prostitutes or other people at the bar leave the bar scene.
We've been able to form some relationships with the women working. It can be challenging though because the women are trying to attract the men and as soon as men come in, they leave us and go straight to them. I got to talk to one of the women, and she said that she had four daughters. It was a little hard to understand her because of the noise and her broken English, but she also said that foreigners like me are so beautiful and that I was beautiful, and she was acting like she wasn't. I said to her, ''You are beautiful!'', and I think that meant a lot to her that I said that and that I wanted to know about who she was as a person and not about what she could do for me. An old man came in and said something vulgar, and then she had to attend to him. When we said bye to her, she was so sweet because she was trying to apologize for leaving our conversation and said that she was sorry that she had to work. We visited her another night and she looked so happy to see us, and she gave us hugs.
One of the first people my partner and I talked to was a transgendered person or a ''ladyboy'' as they are called in Thailand. There is a bar there that is actually called ''Ladyboy'', and there's a lot of ''ladyboys'' there (men who've turned into women). It was a good experience for me because I actually don't know that I've ever had a full conversation with a transgendered person before because honestly that type of person usually scares me, but the one we talked to had such a good heart. I told her that we were ''volunteers'' in Thailand, and she was like, ''Thank you so much for helping us here in Thailand!'' She said that she didn't want to be there, but had ''no choice'' and that she works there randomly. One thing I noticed was that a few Tai men passed by, and she greeted them with a huge smile, and they didn't acknowledge her at all since they were only interested in biological women, and she looked deflated since they didn't even acknowledge her. But I can understand that those men didn't want her to think that they were interested. But I could see that she felt sad that they didn't even acknowledge her even though she puts on a happy face since she wants to give off a ''always-happy'' persona. We haven't seen her since, but were told that she may be there on Monday.
Toward the end of the week, my team and I were questioning the significance of our efforts. We felt overwhelmed by the brokenness and darkness, and we were wondering if our presence was doing anything. We had been praying for people to initiate spiritual conversations with us, but no one had yet. That night, God had people initiate spiritual conversations and show us a glimpse of the impact that He's making through us which was what we prayed for when we were feeling overwhelmed. That night one group had a woman randomly ask right away if they were Christians and the woman said that she follows Jesus, but she said that sometimes she follows Jesus and sometimes she follows Buddha. She first heard about Jesus from other people from our organization that came months before. It was really cool to see how you could see that people from our organization had impacted her, and how women from my team could build off of that. They also set up a time to meet in the day with a woman working in the bars that they had met. That same night, my partner and I saw a man sitting on the street begging. My partner kneeled down first and said hi. Immediately he asked, ''Are you missionaries? Do you love Jesus?'' We said yes and then he said, ''I know, I could tell.'' It was encouraging for someone to guess that we loved Jesus because we stopped to talk to him. He said that he's talked to missionaries before, and again, it was cool to see that missionaries had talked to him in the past and that we could build off of that. However, he said that Jesus was ''good, good'', but that he didn't like Christians. We talked to him for a bit, and then my partner asked if he wanted some Mexican food (her family's Mexican and there was a restaurant down the street that had Mexican food), so we brought him food, and his face had lit up, and he said that he was ''very happy''. He said that his shift of sitting on the street ended in 20 minutes and then he'd eat the food (we weren't sure if it was a personal shift he made for himself or if someone had beggars sit and have shifts like as a business). He then asked us to pray for him, so we prayed for him there on the street in Chiang Mai in the red light district (area of prostitutes and sex trafficking) in the name of Jesus in a country where 95% of the people are Buddhist. We told him that we'd visit him on Monday.
Tonight, we got to go to a huge lantern festival. There was a parade and fireworks and venders and little floating flower things that people put in the river. There were so many lanterns released into the sky, and we all got to release a lantern into the sky. It was so cool to be there and to experience that. I've never been to anything like that before. The festival is a Buddhist festival, but I wrote ''I am the Light of the world. -Jesus'' on mine, and my lantern was to God of the Bible.
I'm excited for what next week has to bring!
Prayer Requests:
1. That people would initiate spiritual conversations, that we'd have opportunities to share the good news, and discernment about when/how to do that- that we'd be a light in the darkness
2. That at least 1 person would leave the bar scene by the time we leave Thailand
3. Pray for the women who work at the coffee shop here
About to release a lantern (sorry it's a little blurry)
