“Come….Follow me”
So… Noah asked me to write a guest blog for him about our experiences on the mission field with him. This is long, it might make you uncomfortable, parts are unbelievable. My hope for you is that you can place yourself in my shoes, that you can walk with me, cry with me, and experience through my words what I did, feel what I felt and know that it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever experienced and we are better for it.
Noah is starting his 9th month out of a 9 month mission trip to 5 different countries called The World Race. During the Parent Launch, we heard about the Parent Vision Trip (PVT). Come to the Parent Vision Trip they said; where you will get to see your child (racer) for the first time in 7 months. You will get to experience some of what they have done, spend time doing ministry side by side with them and have a great time…But then, there was this too……you will be challenged like never before, asked to step out of your comfort zone, fearful of the unknown, tears will be shed, and your heart will be stretched to the breaking point!!! Challenge accepted, sort of.
Seeing my son’s handsome face (albeit a bit scruffy) and those piercing blue eyes for the first time in 7 months was a no-brainer. Being able to hug him and see for myself that he was doing well was first and foremost the reason why we wanted to go. We also planned an extra 5 days on an island staying in a hut on the beach. I’m not gonna lie, I was really looking forward to that part too. As a matter of fact, I would let that part of the trip jump to the forefront of my mind, the ministry part to the back and Noah somewhere in the middle as a buffer. I asked for prayer that the order of my excitement would change and that I wouldn’t focus on the rest and relaxation part at the end, but be prayerfully thinking about the week we would spend in ministry.
I knew what PVT in the Philippines would entail – ‘Bar Ministry’ – going into the seedy bars to try and get the girls out who are being trafficked in the sex trade. We were given an idea at Parent Launch in September what the ‘bar ministry’ was and that it was both very rewarding and heartbreaking. I had my reasons why I was a bit leery. One of them being that I would want nothing more than to personally shame and humiliate the men who are going into these bars for their own sordid pleasure – I would even consider punching them in the face if given the chance. My own rage was hampering my enthusiasm for this trip. I asked for prayer to give me the self control needed to keep my mouth shut and my hands to myself.
Then one morning, after a particularly rough night of dreams, I had this conversation with God while driving (don’t laugh, it happens often):
Me: ‘God, I know I am going to be bad at this ministry. I don’t know if I can hold my anger at bay and I fear that I will say or do something against the men who come into the bars looking for a girl to purchase for an hour or whatever — I just want to punch them in the throat —- ugh, it is making me sick to think about it, they make me so mad, they are dirty and gross.’
God: ‘Eileen, you haven’t looked in the mirror at the dirt on you lately, have you? The mere fact that you have thoughts of shaming and humiliating another, is a sin against me.’
Me: Shameful Silence
God: ‘You have the capacity to love children endlessly. You love those girls, my daughters, who you are going half way around the world to help, and you have never even met them.’
Me: ‘Well, yes I do love them because they are victims of circumstance and not of their choosing. They don’t want to be there and yet they don’t know how to get out. They are innocent children and I do love them.’
God: ‘I love them too. And those men, they are my children too, and I love them as well. Why can’t you look at them with love and compassion? Do as I ask and you will be alright. I am with you.’
Me: ‘I will try to look at them and see them the way you see them God – but it will take a lot of grace and mercy from You to help me with that one…..and I reserve the right to shame or humiliate them and ask forgiveness later.’
God: ‘If you look at them the way I do, you won’t need to resort to anything other than compassion and mercy.’
So from that day forward, I started to get excited about the ministry side of things, the part I’m good at — meeting people where they are and just loving them. The fear of my reaction had subsided and I was ready.
Seeing Noah was so great. I didn’t think I would cry but I did! I was holding my boy again and it was awesome!
We spent time in meetings, we visited two of the ‘safe’ houses (Wisdom House and Love House), we met many of the girls that are in the ‘Wipe Every Tear’ program, rescued and living a life with purpose and a future. Leading up to our trip we would look at the Facebook page of W.E.T. Kenny Sacht (founder and all around good guy) would write us encouraging words – but one thing he always said was that these girls were just normal girls with hopes and dreams. Normal took on a whole new meaning – how can one be ‘normal’ when what they had been through was horrendous? But when we entered those homes, normal was alive and well. The giggling and laughter from these girls was contagious. They were excited for us to see where they lived and what they did each day. They were beautiful, and yes, they were normal girls. We ate dinner with them and we worshiped with them. It was special. We spent Easter Sunday with them and watched 6 of them get baptized in the big pool on the roof of our hotel. They sang and they laughed – I loved it and I had that ‘mama bear’ feeling of wanting to just protect them and love them. While my heart was filled with love for these girls, it broke a bit too because their innocence was taken from them.
The next day we boarded the bus to go to Angeles City – to Walking Street – to the bars – to the enemy’s lair. As I looked around the faces of all the racers and their parents, I could feel the excitement and I could feel the tension. Two hours on the road and we were entering Angeles City – the city of Angels. I could feel the darkness of this place. There was spiritual warfare here, there was darkness that was palpable. I could feel the tightness in my chest – the one I would get prior to this trip when I would worry about how I would react. It was real and I started to pray. I prayed hard that God would lighten my heart, that He would lift my eyes above the darkness and let me see what He wanted me to see.
We settled in the big rainbow hotel – that’s all I have to say about that!
We had dinner all together as a group, we worshiped and people prophesied about what was going to happen this evening. We went over again what to expect and what we were to say to these young girls. We were given cards from Wipe Every Tear to hand out that explains the program they offer. It is quite simple really – the FREE program offers girls a home, an education, money, a bed, blankets, pillows, and food — things we take for granted every day but things they didn’t have. We would tell them all of this and then let them know that we would be boarding a bus in two days to go back to those houses and they could come with us and check it out. Sounds like an easy sell, right? Not so fast. These girls were wary of foreigners, rightly so. They were told by people they thought they could trust that we were the ones who would exploit them, we would sell them, or worse, we would kill them if they went with us. Our battle was before us.
We separated into several small groups (we were over 100 people strong for this mission), prayed together in our groups and headed out onto Walking Street. Walking Street – a quarter to half mile stretch of road that no motor vehicles are allowed on – thus the name. Along this stretch of road on either side are bars, lots and lots of bars. In those bars are over 15,000 girls who are in the sex trafficking industry. I am going to repeat this part because it is worth repeating — there are over 15,000 girls being unwillingly sold for an hour, night, or weekend at a time. They are normal girls with hopes and dreams. They are children, who through no fault of their own are being used and abused for the pleasures of foreign men. How in the world was I going to get through this? More broken pieces of my heart. I clung to Bill for assurance. His big hand was warm against mine as we walked. Our group was the largest – 11 strong. We had four Filipina girls to translate for us – one of which was in the program, the others were there for the first time to help with this ministry. Each group had at least one bright, beautiful Filipina girl from the Wipe Every Tear program to translate and more importantly, relate to the very girls we were trying to rescue.
‘Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid, do not be discouraged, for the LORD your GOD is with you wherever you go.’
Joshua 1:9
This is the verse I always turn to when I am discouraged, afraid, wary, or unsure. But wow, what strength did these young girls have…to have the courage to face their past, to go back into the very places that degraded them, to be the voice of hope for the rest. Oh, the grace they possess.
As we walked down the street, we all decided to enter our first bar. Funny how most everyone else remembered the names of the bars they entered – not me. I couldn’t tell you the name of even one bar we went into or whether it was on the left or right. As the door opened, the assault on my senses was crazy. They were on active overdrive. The music was loud, really loud…the lights were bright and neon and flashing…the smells were a mixture of, well, something not great. My eyes were averted, I’m not sure why, maybe because I didn’t want to fall in the unfamiliar surroundings, maybe I just wasn’t prepared to look at the stage that took up most of the room. This particular bar had two levels. We went upstairs and sat down looking down onto the stage where many young girls dressed in black underwear and bra with a see through cover-up were dancing. There were about a dozen of them. Then there were another 6-8 girls dressed in very short, very tight red dresses and another half dozen dressed in white dresses. It wasn’t long before the DJ was announcing the names of each girl while they walked down the stage much like a model on the runway. The girls wouldn’t make eye contact, they didn’t want to be there – that much was clear. My nerves were a jumble as I looked around. My eyes kept going to a young girl dressed in a white dress. She was trying to hide behind another girl and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘God, is this the girl I’m supposed to ‘call down’ to talk to?’, I prayed. I felt assured that she was and I looked to our Filipina translators. They asked if I was ready to call a girl over and I said yes and pointed to the girl I wanted to talk to first. In this particular bar you would tell the waitress or a ‘mamasan’ which girl you wanted to talk to and they would go over and get her attention and then show her who was calling her down. (Mamasans were usually women who had been trafficked but are now too old and so they oversee the girls.) Common practice used to be pinning a number to the bottom piece of their attire and the men would just tell the mamasan what number they were interested in. Now, it is more streamlined — you decide what girl you want to call down and the mamasan will use a laser pointer to point to her and let her know that her number was called. What? You read that correctly, a laser pointer would be utilized to call/purchase a girl. My heart broke a bit more.
When you ‘call down’ a girl, you are essentially saying you are interested in her. You must buy her a drink – that is how the bars make money because human trafficking is illegal (yep, it is – all over the world and yet it happens all over the world) — so calling a girl down and buying her a drink isn’t trafficking — at lease this is how the bar owners and patrons view it.
For those of you reading this that have daughters, granddaughters, sisters, or are a young woman yourself, I want you to think for a moment what that must be like. You are on a stage, dressed in practically nothing, dancing in high heels for up to 12 hours at a time, and praying that no one ‘calls’ you down for a drink. The look on the faces of these girls when they are called is one of abject fear, especially when they saw Noah or Bill or another man in our group calling them down. Heartbreak.
My young girl’s name was Flora – 19 years old and quite beautiful. She had only been in this place for a few months. Her parents thought she was here to have a better life, to be a hostess at a restaurant. You see, that is how they get these girls — they don’t come to Angeles City on their own. They might live several hours, even days away and they are poor, very poor. They can no longer go to school because they need to help support their families but there are no jobs around. The bars will send people into these extremely poor places and tell them that they have jobs, waitresses, hostesses, cashiers, or door girls. Sounds respectable enough. Parents send their daughters off with the hope that they will have a better life and that they will be able to send money back and that they will not be hungry. They have no idea what is really about to happen. The people coercing the girls out of their homes to a ‘better life’ tell them that they will pay for their ticket because they will be making enough money to pay them back. So on they go. When they arrive, there are no jobs for them like what was mentioned and since they have no money, they can’t go back home. Not to mention, they ‘owe’ for the ticket. Now they are trapped. On more then one occasion a young girl said she couldn’t leave because she needed to pay her ticket. They are made to believe that they have to repay for this ticket and until they do, they cannot leave. I offered to pay Flora’s ‘ticket’. She didn’t know how much it was anymore because they kept adding to it. My heart broke a little more. Flora had looked at me with wary reserve. She wasn’t sure what I was about. She was skeptical. She had heard of the Wipe Every Tear organization but only that it was bad and they were out to hurt them more. I asked Flora if I looked like a woman who would hurt her or wanted to lie to her? Queli (my translator and my beautiful friend) asked her in Tagalog. Flora searched my face, she looked into my eyes, she touched my cheek and she said ‘Eyes of Love, you have eyes of love.’ Wow! We broke through her fear.
Yes, Flora, I love you and God loves you and He sees you. He sees your struggle, He sees how much you have sacrificed and He wants you to know He is with you. She told us she believes in Jesus but she didn’t think He could possibly still love her after this. We assured her that He will always love her, He will always be there, He will never leave her.
We spoke to so many that night, different bars, different girls, same stories. We were on a mission to get as many girls out of this situation as we possibly could. The next night was the same…..dinner, worship, prayer, and off we went. More bars….more girls…..
On Wednesday morning, we patiently watched and waited to see who would take us up on the offer of freedom – who believed we were for real and wanted to find out for themselves, who were ready to start anew. 22 GIRLS BOARDED THE BUS BACK TO MANILA THAT MORNING!! 22 girls took a chance that Wipe Every Tear was their ticket out, that they could trust us, that they could have a future that was good and purposeful, that people they didn’t even know loved and prayed for them! I can’t even begin to explain the exhilaration we all felt at the sight.
In those moments, I knew why I was there. God gave me the courage to step into this place and out of all that I know and am comfortable with and he challenged me in a way that I didn’t think I could handle. He was with me, He was guiding my every step, He was keeping me from crying out for these beautiful young girls because they didn’t need to see my tears- they needed to see my resolve at helping them, He was holding their hands with mine. He was giving me the words to speak to these girls.
And…He was giving me the compassion and mercy I needed to not look at the men with judgment. Oh, it was hard, incredibly so in some of those bars — but God gave me the grace to look at them with those same eyes of love. I saw them, I watched them, I even smiled at several — all the while praying for them. I prayed that the scales would be removed from their eyes and they would see these young girls as human beings with a purpose that did not include them. I prayed while watching them, that God would convict their hearts and they would walk out and never return.
My heart was stretched, my faith in mankind was challenged, my love for all people was tested. I am changed. I am ready to face the next time. I know there will be another time because pieces of my heart were left there in the Phillippines, there with my lovely new friends at Wipe Every Tear, there with the many girls that we didn’t talk to or rescue, there on Walking Street. God is still writing this story, I am just a vessel for His glory. Can I get an Amen!!!!
Thank you for enduring this incredibly long story — I appreciate your willingness to get vulnerable with me. I would encourage you to go to the Wipe Every Tear FB page, or to this website https://wipeeverytear.org to check out what they do and how you can help. Sex trafficking is a billion dollar industry that takes place in every country – everyday. We may not be able to help everyone, but you darn well better bet, we won’t give up trying.
