I’ve been trying to write this blog for two weeks now but none of my words ever seem to be good enough or adequately present how I felt during the whole thing, but I want people to read this so badly so here is my best shot.
2 weeks ago my mom came and visited me here in the Philippines! (Hi, mom!!!! I loved having you here more than I told you, but this blog isnt really about you, sorry!) It was two universes colliding, weird and amazing, a blessing for sure. During the Parent Vision Trip, a trip where we can invite our parents to meet us on the field to do ministry with us, we partnered with an organization apart from the 3 ministries our squad is with currently. The ministry we partnered with is called Wipe Every Tear, an organization that is working to get women out of sex trafficking and working to break the cycle of slavery that is currently present in the world. They give free schooling, food, shelter, allowance and sponsorship for their children to all of the girls that enter their program.
Now lets talk about sex trafficking and sex tourism. I knew slavery still existed in the world before the Race, but didn’t mind much attention to it outside of the agriculture industry. In the Dominican Republic, we learned a lot about sex trafficking from our hosts in doing research for fundraising for safe houses, and then saw it during our first debrief in a pizza restaurant where an old man was buying a young girl for the night. The dictionary definition for sex trafficking is the illegal business of recruiting, harboring, transporting, obtaining, or providing a person and especially a minor for the purpose of sex. We saw a lot of it in the DR, but nothing compared to what we saw a couple weeks go in Angeles City.
We were in Quezon City, Manila, for a couple days to visit the safe-houses there for the girls who had been rescued from sex trafficking and then went to the site of it all after 2 nights in Quezon. Walking Street, Angeles City— a dystopia, a lustful man’s paradise, a place where sin is abundant and behind every corner. Walking Street is a street, about a mile long, that is full of about 25 bars where over 15,000 trafficked girls work, dancing for foreign men, wearing little to no clothes. These girls, people like you and I, are prostituted and exploited daily just to earn $4 a night, $34 if they get sold for the night. We went into these alternate universes of sin and shame called clubs to try to get these girls out of these horrid establishments and into Wipe Every Tear’s care. We actually got to go into the bars and tell these girls about this awesome organization we were with and invite them to see the safe houses and gave them all the information we could. We went up on stage and danced with them and bought them drinks and talked and laughed and played pool. Sometimes it oddly felt like I was just hanging out with one of my friends from home.
That’s what made this so hard for me: these girls just felt like my sisters, my friends, my schoolmates, people I knew, but they were being taken advantage of and sold for their bodies just to earn half a living. They were girls who had the unimaginable done to them, by their friends, family, customers, strangers. They had every reason to feel shameful and gross and unworthy, but Jesus still died for them. Love was literally redefined for me that week. Kenny, the guy who started WET, loves the girls there so well. That is his one mission in life, to love people especially girls who had been affected by sex trafficking. He started this organization for these girls as a way to show them the love of Jesus. These girls, who probably have never been shown real love before, got to experience just a glimpse of what Jesus thinks of them when we walked into the bar and talked to them like the people they were instead of being undressed, metaphorically and physically. Jesus died for everyone, including the Filipina that was selling her body, whether by choice or not.
The hardest to see that was loved: the men. The foreign men in bars, whether American or Korean, or European or whatever, they were hard to look at and say that Jesus loved them too, especially when they were calling girls over to dance on them or walking into their hotels with a Filipina by they side. But Jesus’ love isn’t conditional or exclusive, its for everyone, even the American guy I saw throwing money at half-naked girls on stage or the Arabian man that brought a girl back to the hotel. Kenny told us during one of the sessions that these men were loved by Jesus just as much as we are and just as much as those girls are. Kenny, the guy who knows the stories of the bar girls more than anyone else I met, said that in the name of Jesus he loved those men too!!!!!
The box of love that I had put Jesus in completely exploded during PVT, where I saw that Jesus genuinely loves ever single sinner. & that he really is the way, the truth and the life.
