Imagine.
A teenage girl with the weight of responsibility of feeding her family. She doesn’t have strength like her brothers. She doesn’t have years of experience like her parents. All she has is her virginity that can be sold at a high price.
She promises her family that she will return once she has provided enough money to sustain her family, because, after all, her family is the most important part of her life. Now some six years later, trapped in the industry, which communicates value in make-up and the number of men per night, her family depends on her income for their daily life.
These are the women who I am reaching this month—giving their bodies up by choice, but so far deep in their choice that they don’t know how to get out.
As we walk the strip on Bangla Road, the heart of the sex industry, I’ve had a plethora of emotion:
Sadness
toward the girls and their willingness to give up their bodies to these ungrateful, lonesome men.
Anger
toward the men, these creatures who lurk from bar to bar in search of the best “prize”, oblivious of the entrapment that their possession is encompassed by.
Heartache
for those working in the bars or on them, and for those walking through the sin or blindly doing what they were told was right. These lost souls searching for happiness, thinking they will find it in the alcohol, the lust, the perversion, or the debauchery that is readily available any step of their drunken stagger.
It’s so easy to see this strip as a dark, desperate place, but it is filled with
HOPE
if we open our eyes to the work of God rather than the evil one.
