[As the title suggests, I wanted to write 11 blogs summarising my 11 months of The World Race, one by one. I want to be able to look back in a few years time and remember every detail, but I also want you to be able to live the memories with me. Each week I am going to share a blog post about a country, and also my top ten photos from that month (on my social media). I hope it gives you more of a look into what our lives have looked like this year. This is a look into Month 4.]
Hello! My name is Krista (AKA Prisca), and I spent the first four months of the World Race with Chloe and Team Haven (SHOUTOUT TO MY OG HAVEN LADIES!).
In month 4 Team Haven traveled to the beach city of Phuket, Thailand to partner with a local church there. Our ministry was spending time forming relationships with with bartenders and tourists. We spent our afternoons in the bars, making friends with the workers over watermelon sodas and intense games of Jenga and Connect-4. By the end of the month, Chloe and I could simply walk into our favorite bar and they would immediately have watermelon sodas and Connect-4 waiting for us!
At nights we walked to a couple of the bars off the main drag of Bangla Road, the well-traveled street known specifically for its strip clubs and bars. Our purpose was solely to form relationships with the dancers. We learned their names, heard their stories, and made sure it was very clear that we wanted nothing from them except their presence (and maybe their killer gaming strategies).
It was both heart-breaking and fulfilling ministry. These girls are my age, often at least ten hours from home; they see their family once every couple of months. They work in the sex industry because it pays significantly more than any other job they could find, all so that they can send all the money back to their poverty-stricken parents, husbands, or children. I struggled, and still struggle, to grasp the reality of selling your body to feed your starving family. It can’t quite be boiled down to a simple right and wrong when you’re face-to-face with these beautiful women.
One of my sweetest memories from Thailand happened the very first night we went to Bangla Road. We didn’t quite know what to expect walking into the night bar for the first time. A couple girls stood on the bars dancing on poles while the rest of the women talked to the customers trying to get them to buy drinks. It was dark and dingy; the music was loud and people were yelling all around us. Our senses were overloaded taking in the sights and smells of this place.
We sat down at one of the tables, ordered ginger ales, and jumped into ministry by calling over some of the girls to play Connect-4. One of the girls who came over looked about my age. She had long reddish brown hair, beautifully smiley eyes, and little black hearts painted on her cheeks. I immediately wanted to be her friend.
Within a few minutes I found out that she’s only a couple years older than me with two young children and a boyfriend at home in Bangkok, which is about a twelve hour bus ride from Phuket. She sees her family once every three or so months, spending her time dancing and sleeping with men for money to send back to her home. I didn’t really know how to process everything she had just told me in our first conversation. I wanted to fix her situation, to somehow give her another job or more money so she wouldn’t have to live that life that seemed to lead her nowhere good. But I couldn’t fix it, and can’t. All I could do was love her and meet her exactly where she is without judgement or ulterior motives.
So, I asked her to paint my face to look like her. She lit up, ran behind the bar to get her makeup bag, and laughed as she painted the same little black hearts on my cheeks that she had on hers. We took lots of pictures before she ran back to the bar, because it was then her turn to dance on the pole.
Every night we visited after that she painted my face. It wasn’t complicated; it was just makeup. But I do feel like Jesus would’ve spent a lot of time in that bar with those prostitutes getting his face painted so that he could hear their stories. Jesus overthrew most cultural norms that took advantage of the lesser, and that’s exactly what happens every night on Bangla Road. People visit either to consume or condemn, but we got to bring Jesus-like compassion in the form of little black hearts.
Sometimes all it takes is the willingness to get a little bit of black paint on your face in order to bring the love of Jesus to a bar.
