“I’m so sick of all the girls at home, all of them are so fat and boring. Here the girls are all young and fun, and they’re literally a dime a dozen. I just get a bunch of them to hit the town with and the fun doesn’t end. I come out here a few times a year, just for the girls.”
That was my introduction to Thai culture getting off the plane on Sunday night. After traveling for 24 hours plus and losing an additional 20 hours somewhere over the Pacific, I was a little less than prepared to face a middle aged firefighter from Chicago that was essentially the embodiment of everything I’ve come here to work against. I suppressed the wave of physical illness that washed over me while also resisting the urge to tear his eyes out, and calmly attempted to comment on the ideals of human slavery. In the 40 seconds we got to speak on the shuttle across the tarmac, it definitely didn’t set in.
It’s hard for me when I’m at home reading about the troubles of the world and can link nearly every single one of them back to North America or at least western civilization as a whole. How we acquire our raw materials from African countries at prices that make it so those countries are completely impoverished, while we’re getting richer off those same materials. That our ideals based on the all powerful dollar have caused near genocide in other countries as factions attempt to control the resources we pay so little for in the end. And that an astounding number of westerners fully support the idea of buying another person’s body for an evening, so many that it’s a 20 something billion dollar industry where it only costs a few bucks a night for a girl. Whoever says we don’t have slavery anymore is not as educated on the matter as they’d like to think. We’ve merely outsourced our slavery in the form of entire nations, people groups, and the sex industry.
The firefighter’s parting comment was along the same lines of many comments made by people to me as I told them about my trip over the last few months: ‘There’s too much pain out there to help everyone’ or ‘you can’t save the world, you know’ or more simply, ‘why are you wasting your time?’ I can see their point of view, because really, what can a few people do about a well established multi-billion dollar slave trade? Or a starving nation in Africa that your own home country is profiting off of? Do you know how many millions of people are just starving to death on the streets of our world?
Here’s what I believe, with all my heart – one day there was a huge storm on the coast, bringing high sea levels and massive waves all through the night. The next day a young boy was walking along the beach and discovered that the high sea level and waves had washed hundreds, maybe thousands of starfish up on shore, too high for the tide to reach them again any time soon. Knowing that they would die if left there, the boy began picking up the stranded starfish and tossing them back into the ocean one by one. Awhile later a man happened upon the boy, and after watching him for a few minutes asked him ‘Why are you doing that? You’ll never be able to save them all, there’s far too many. Even if you work the whole day, you can’t even hope to make the slightest difference!’ The boy paused for a moment to look at the man, bent over to pick up another starfish, and tossed it back into the ocean. Before carrying on to the next one, he turned back to the man and simply said:
‘Made a difference to that one.’
I can’t save everyone. I can’t change the course of the sex trade or the human trafficking in Thailand. I can’t cure every AIDS victim in Africa, or feed every widow, or house every child. I can’t share the gospel with everyone that’s never heard it – I don’t even speak most of their languages. But I will make a difference to someone. And if one person can step out of the life of crap that my western world has thrown down on their heads and live a life out of bondage and death, then it was worth 11 months of my life. More than that, it’s worth my whole life, every day of it.
