Tonight, Hannah, Anne and I are going to meet our friend Rika*.
We met Rika two weeks ago. She’s a thin Thai woman with waist-long hair. She looks younger than her 26 years, with her feisty personality and cute appearance. She loves to eat steak. She likes fishing and adventures, but hates to walk. And whenever we see her, she’s so excited to see us, giving us hugs and smiles, and telling us she missed us.
She could be just like any other one of our friends…
Then reality sets in.
We are hugging, but we are in a bar, and she is wearing scanty, revealing clothes. She pauses from a game of pool with an older man she has been entertaining to come speak with us. At 26, her make-up can still cover and beautify the face that is haggard from sleeplessness and hard drinking. It’s a treat for her when her “male companions” take her out for steak. When her “boyfriends” are there to pay for a sung-tao (taxi-truck), there is no need to walk. And while fishing and adventures are a sweet memory from her past, there is no longer time to do it while there is money to be earned in the bars of land-locked Chiang Mai every night.
I remember the first night I met her – I was with a girl working with YWAM named Princess. “You are beautiful!” Princess told her. “What?!” cried Rika. “Sure?” It amazed me that this woman, whose job was in some part to sell her beauty, really didn’t think she was beautiful. “Many men tell me I am beautiful,” she confides, “but they are only saying that to get something they want. But from you, I believe.”
We go back to see her a couple times, and by the third night our friendship was sealed. One Friday night, we paid her bar fee (the fee men usually pay to take a bar-girl out for the night) and took her to Wongen Café, where there was an open mic night. As we rode the sung-tao, her eyes were wide as she looked around. In her 2 months in Chiang Mai, she had not even explored the city; she had been working every night. When we got there, her eyes got even wider. Farangs (foreigners), students partnering with YWAM, served the food and joked with her in Thai. Farang men and women had innocent fun together, just singing and laughing. There was no agenda. Hannah and I even got up on stage and dedicated a song to her. Although we were just beginning to enjoy ourselves, her boyfriend called and we escorted her back to the bar. I think she left with a mixture of regret and relief, as she returned to her familiar surroundings.
As we rode back on the sung-tao with her, she asked us when we would come back to Thailand. We weren’t sure, we replied. “Oh, you just broke my heart,” she half-amusedly answered, as if knowing her own request was ridiculous. “I miss you already when you don’t come to the bar for one day.”
This past Tuesday, we go to see Rika after an absence of two nights. When she saw us, she immediately came and hugged us, exclaiming as she gestured to the man she was playing pool with, “I was just telling George* about you!” Her previous “boyfriend” of three weeks had just left for home, and without time to even mourn, a new man had already booked her time. But to Rika, that’s the way it works, and she doesn’t spend long bemoaning it. She was super excited to challenge Hannah to pool again (unlike us, Hannah has decent skills, though still not enough to beat a practiced bar-girl like Rika), and throughout the night kept saying, “I told George about you just half an hour ago, and I thought you would come, and then you did!” She was so excited to see us.
As foreigners, we often hear about and are concerned for the girls who are trafficked into the bars. Some women are, and their tales are tragic stories. Rika, however, is not one of them. For various reasons, a divorce, desire to earn money and find a farang boyfriend, hopelessness regarding job options, she has chosen the bar life. Although she doesn’t try to show it, it is easy to see the deep loneliness and hurt she feels as men enter and leave her life, and as she accepts her drinking and disordered eating habits as the best there is.
“If Jesus were physically walking the earth today,” Taryn said, “I believe He would be in the bars.”
The longer we are here, the more I believe what Taryn stated. Underneath the wooings and catcalls of the women are deceptions and lies, brokenness and hurt that they are not beautiful, they are not worth more, that this is the only way, this is all there is. And underneath the abusive behaviour of the men often lie a lonely heart, rejected by the women they knew, lost in their own unquenchable desire to be loved.
Ephesians 2:1-4
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ…
Jesus would be in the bars today; and He is. Each of us are His ambassadors, His hands and feet as He sends us into the bars. Although our time with Rika was short, that is not the end. God will continue to relentlessly pursue her, sending more people to bring her His love. Already the climate of Bar Street is changing; there is real love occurring on the streets. Yesterday, in an astonishing revelation of His great power, a whole bar invited some of our girls out to dinner with them! Women are opening up to us as if we had known each other a long time. God is at work here.
I’ve never thought of entering the bars as a way of ministering to people. This month really has been unlike any other, and definitely unlike last month where we played with African kids who tackled us. Yes, it sounds scary, and yes, we stand out like a sore thumb, with our conservative clothes, our non-alcoholic drinks, and our terrible pool skills. “What are girls like you doing here?” one man had commented. But the point is, that strange as we are, people can sense the love and light of Jesus that is in us, and the bar-girls are starving for the love and grace that we carry. And, I’ve realized, our enemy is not here; it’s not the women, it’s not the men, but it’s the lies and deceptions of the Enemy playing on our broken, sinful human natures that play, indulge, hurt but are still left yearning for more.
We have a Thai friend named Rika. She hopes, loves, and dreams just like any other girl does. As we spend these short weeks with her and pour love into her, I know that God will use us – and all who came before and come after us – to change Bar Street, one girl at a time.
*names changed
