"I feel like an idiot for just sitting here and waiting," I told Miranda, my brain playing a million scenarios of what our driver could possibly be doing wherever he went.
And then I saw him down the alley, crouching around a different tuk-tuk with probably 10 other Khmer men. It looked as if they were trying to fix something, so I asked Miranda to wait with our bags and went over to see what they were doing. I stood there and watched as these men stared at the back of this random tuk-tuk as a different man was drilling some sort of advertisement to the back of it.
Me walking down the alley to find our driver.
“Great,” I thought. “We drove around aimlessly for 20 minutes, got carted down a dark alley, and were scared for lives all so our tuk-tuk driver could make a pit stop to ‘pimp his ride’.”
I tapped our driver on the shoulder, threw my arms in the air and yelled, “What are you doing?!” Of course he didn’t understand me, but one of the other men must have at least been able to sense the frustration in my voice as he said in broken English, “You. Wait 10 minutes. Tank you,” with a huge grin of amusement on his face.
So I walked back to Miranda and explained that we were waiting for our driver to finish blinging out his tuk-tuk. We both started laughing hysterically, wondering how in the world this had become our lives, praising God that we weren’t actually being sold in prostitution or robbed for our goods.
Me with our driver and his new blinged out tuk-tuk. Did I mention that we went to the city in the clothes we had been painting in for a week straight? Yes… Welcome to the World Race. =)
As we sat on the curb of the ally waiting, a middle-aged woman sitting in a chair outside of a dark building caught both of our eyes.
“I think she’s a pimp,” Miranda said.
We watched as another woman scantly dressed sat down in front of her, discreetly handing her fistfuls of cash, while the woman in the chair dumped the money in her purse and marked in a big book she had sitting on her lap.
“Definitely,” I said.
When the first woman left, Miranda and I sat there watching, making eye contact with the woman in the chair for a brief second before she quickly averted her eyes. Just as quickly as the first woman left another woman, dressed in a short skit and black, knee-high, high-heeled boots, walked right past us to the woman in the chair. Once again we watched as she handed her wads of cash, the woman marking something in her book. The second woman left and Miranda and I knew for sure what was going on, God showing us the workings of a back alley brothel right before our eyes.
We started praying right where were, but soon found ourselves walking over to the woman (who didn’t speak English) and praying around her table and chair, praying around her building and proclaiming Jesus all along the ally. We prayed out loud, breaking the chains of prostitution in the name of Jesus. We prayed for the brothel to be shut down, that the doors would close and never open again. We prayed for the prostitutes inside, that they would leave and never come back, that they would be filled with a sense of love and worth from the Lord. We shouted praises over the building, over the woman, all while she sat there watching us, claiming that the building would become a place of refuge and safety. We were on the front lines that morning, fighting the enemy in a dark alley.
Miranda and I stopped praying and looked at each other, knowing full well why the Lord brought us down that dark alley that day, knowing our detour served a purpose far beyond what our eyes could see, that we were taken there to shine God’s light in the darkest of places.
We’ll probably never know what happened to that brothel or to the pimp who ran it, but I know that God was moving and working that day and that something great will be made of that place. Our morning didn’t go how we planned, and while we probably didn’t make the smartest decisions throughout the course of the morning, I’m completely in awe of God’s protection over us and that He allowed us to play the smallest of parts in bringing His Kingdom to a dark alley in the middle of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Thanks to Miranda for documenting our adventure… Even if it did almost get us into trouble. 😉
