Bangla Road is by far the darkest place I’ve ever been to. Coming straight off the beach, with familiar restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, and Starbucks on both ends of the streets, Bangla Road easily attracts tourists right into the heart of the bar district. There are even shortcuts to markets that lead the naive and ignorant straight past places like ‘The Devil’s Playground’. It’s deception at its finest.
Walking around, it feels like Austin’s 6th Street on steroids… and then some. All along the streets, there are women poll dancing with numbers attached to them only to later be auctioned off to the highest bidder or raffled to some ‘lucky’ winner. Men and women stand in the streets trying to distribute menus of women and their price of sale. A large crowd gathers around taking pictures of the ladyboys strutting their stuff along the strip. The lonely and depressed walk around, looking for something to fill a greater void that can’t be expressed. In the bars not only can you buy drinks, but you can purchase the women for an hour, a night, a week, or even longer if you wish… for the price of the drink ‘sex on the beach’ you can literally buy sex on the beach.
The vast majority of these women are prisoners, trapped in a world where there seems to be no hope. Most of the women are uneducated and moved to the city to find work… unable to find anything else, they succumbed to the bars and being used for sex to make ends meet. Some are sent here by family to earn money in order to provide for the family back at home… a few even threatened if they were to leave. Others have suffered great tragedy, like the loss of a spouse, to where they believe this is now their only option for survival. A lot of the women live together above the bar, not receiving a salary except for the money they get when men buy them. Once they start working, they become resigned to this life, absolutely hating it.
These are just the things we actually see (for our protection we are only allowed in open areas)… there’s no telling how much actual trafficking and other stuff happen behind the closed doors here. To get an actual feel of what were up against this month (and what I’ll be praying through as I walk around starting tonight), I wanted to share this video that K-Squad alum Ashley Higgins made about their time on Bangla Road last spring. Just as a warning, there is graphic footage as it does show exactly what we see each night as we walk around:
alone on bangla road. from ashley higgins on Vimeo.
