I love Thailand.
Half way through our month and its already been the most productive and fun month of the trip so far. The first week, half of the guys including myself stayed at a nice house with bunk beds with the grandparents of the Roloffs from TLC’s reality show Little People Big World. No joke, we were living with Peggy and Ron Roloff, who are not only wonderful Christians with a heart for missions, but quite the characters themselves who parented midget kids who now have their own reality TV show.
During the day, all the guys meet at a 10 acre property children’s home to do manual labor. Half of the guys dig trenches with hoes and shovels which is back breaking to say the least. Basically we are digging a ditch along side a 200 yard dirt driveway so the road doesn’t get washed away in the rainy season. The other half of the guys are clearing dense jungle brush, weeds, and hacking down trees with machetes and sickles to clear their fence line and beautify their property so the children can feel proud of where they live. Thrashing through horny vines can be pretty uncomfortable in the heat, but its awesome to see progress made each day. Part of the fun is making huge fires to burn all of what was cut down. Its all good hardy man-work that we’ve been given during the day. This is a welcome change for most of us guys who have seen almost no physical work in all three months of Africa. We work hard, but its fun to be all the boys cracking jokes all day long. Plus we get fed well with huge amounts of delicious Thai food that is prepared by the Thai house moms at the Children’s homes.
The ministry that we work with is called Remember Nhu and its two children’s homes that house 30 girls each from ages 7 to about 16. These girls are all orphans who come from near by mountain villages where pimps often go to buy young girls who are then sold into sex slavery or forced to work in the bars of the local red light district. Its so awesome to see the joy in these girls faces and know that they are in a loving home where they are well taken care of, get to attend school, and learn about the love of the Lord when they could easily be soliciting dirt old white men for $12 to spend the night in their hotel room. After working all day in the dirt and fields, we (all the guys) get to eat dinner with these precious girls at their homes, rotating every other night between the two homes that are less than a mile apart. By the end of the first night, most of the girls had already warmed up to us. We play games, mostly chasing them around, but also playing cards, teach each other magic tricks or guitar, or watching them perform little musical skits they put together in their spare time. Those 2 hours of dinner and playing with the girls are my sweetest 2 hours of my day.
The interesting and unfortunate thing that I have seen is what happens to young girls who are not rescued by organizations like Remember Nhu. Our WR girl’s team is 30 mins away in the heart of Chiang Mai working with an organization that brings girls and women out of the red light districts who don’t want to be there, which is a lot of them. But its complicated; if they leave, they can’t return to their village where their family is because the pimps know where their village is and will simply go back and retrieve them. They can’t just walk away either, as they will need to find another source of income to live in a major city, but of course most of them are uneducated and unskilled so thats no easy task.
On the weekends, some of us guys get to go into town and join our girl’s teams for ministry. I’ve been out twice and each time I’ve had amazing experiences and encounters.
Last night, I was out with 5 other teammates, 3 girls and 2 guys, and I ended up meeting a sweet bar girl by the name of Wan. She initially told me she was 19 through another girl who spoke english as Wan did not. Later we met another lady who was a bit older, maybe in her mid 30’s who turned out to be Wan’s Aunt and was also working the bars. Wan spoke no english and was very shy at first. Through her Aunt, we found out that is was Wan’s 4th night working in the bars as she just recently bought from the villages. Her mother had sold her for a small price as girls in this society are often valued lower than dirt. Wan’s aunt came to the city to look after her, but had to start working in the bars also to support herself while living in the city. It was the Aunts first night on the job.
The way these bars work is that men will go in and buy a drink. They are quickly approached by any of the bar girls who ultimately are soliciting sex from these men for a price as low as $8 to $20 dollars to ask them to go back to their hotel. At most bars are pool tables, but just about every bar as our favorite childhood games of Connect Four and Jenga. So the bars are filled with middled aged and older white men playing Connect Four with Thai teenagers and young women that will ultimately lead to a negotiation of the price that will ultimately be paid at the end of the night.
At first I thought how perverse it was to use board games to break the ice leading in essence to prostitution as if that some how made it different than pulling a girl off the street standing on a street corner…. but sometimes you have to use whats given to you to your advantage. So the plan last night was that my friend Carin and I would find the youngest looking girl in the bars and try to talk to her. Thats when I spotted Wan. Turns out she lied to me about being 19 because her Aunt revealed that she is really only 17 and is just scared of police finding out and getting in even more trouble. You could see the reservation in her eyes as I first started to interact with her.
So for almost 2 hours, Wan and I played Connect Four and other games on paper while Carin invited her Aunt who spoke a little English to the local organization that she works with to “learn English” but will also be presented with a way out of the industry and also learn about who Christ is, which is rare in a country that is less than 2% Christian and over 97% Buddhist. The tactic here was that the younger girls are usually in high demand and more popular with the men who frequent these bars, so by me playing games with her until the bar closed at 2am, no other guys were able to talk little Wan and take her home. We don’t know what she had experienced in the 4 nights she had been working the bars, but we are all hoping and praying she can escape while she is still relatively unscathed and has her innocence.
After that night, I had a new appreciation for the girls I was working with at the Remember Nhu Children’s homes as these girls could easily be in situations like Wan’s or worse.
I feel so blessed to be able to work with these amazing girls and be a light to them all. Theres really mot much more that I can think of that is more rewarding than helping change someone’s life that can help set the course for the rest of their lives!
