This month, my female teammates and I have been with two other teams in Chiang Mai, Thailand. All the men on the squad are off doing "manistry" on a goat farm for the month. This has given us women the opportunity to head to a big city, shop, get massages and pedicures, go out to dinner, and spend every night at the bar. Okay, before you call AIM to retract your support money, I think I should explain that this hasn't been a vacation, but all these things have been a part of our ministry this month. We have been working with an organization called Love Acts which is a part of Lighthouse in Action. Love Acts looks to reach women, men, and ladyboys working in the Red Light District in Chiang Mai. So while our men are off being men, getting sweaty and camping under the stars, we are just being girls this month, using our greatest assets, our hearts to live out Jesus' love.
The idea of "girls being girls" has been on my mind these last few weeks because the bar girls we work with don't get to be girls. A lot of them are between the ages of 15 and 20 and are either traffiked or are sent out to earn money for their families. Many of them live at the bars and have never left Bar Street. My teammate, Taryn and I have been going out to the bars together each night and have built friendships with several bar girls, bartenders, and ladyboys. There have been a couple of girls who work at the same bar who have become very dear to us. They have been friends since childhood and came to Chiang Mai together. They are very young and it feels so wrong that they should be out in these bars every night. It has also disturbed Taryn and I that these two young girls always seem to have customers. They are very poplular, especially with older men.
We decided to ask the girls if they wanted to spen time together outside of the bar and they very excitedly invited us to have dinner with all the girls from the bar on Big Buddha Day. Taryn and I joined them at a popular "cook your own food" barbecue place. Even with the major language barrier, we laugh the night away and enjoyed one another's company. Something we both noticed was that none of the girls were drinking alcohol. They were drinking sodas, laughing, talking on their cellphones, and acting like girls their age normally do.
Last night, we stopped by the bar and Taryn and Carly played some worship music for them. We invited the two girls we had been spending time with to come get ice cream with us. One of the girls had a customer already, but the other girl said she wanted to come, so we paid her bar fee with the assurance that she would not have to return to the bar that night. We went for ice cream at a local cafe, then Carly had to go meet with some girls she had built relationships with so Taryn and I took our friend to get fish pedicures. If you don't know what that is, it is where you put your feet into a tank of water and allow fish to eat the dead skin off of your feet. Our girl had never been before and laughed the entire time as the fish were tickling her feet. Afterwards, we ran into one of the other girls from the bar and met back up with Carly and the squad leaders to sing worship songs by the river. We were able to share the gospel with the girls and tell them that they are loved. When it was time for us to leave, our friend said she was tired and wanted to go home, which is GREAT!!! That's exactly what she should be doing. She's just a girl, and for at least a couple of nights, she got to be exactly who she is supposed to be.
