**NOTE: MILDLY EXPLICIT CONTENT. MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR YOUNG EARS.
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I genuinely have started this blog a few hundred times and never finished it. I’m rarely short for written words. But it’s hard to feel I’ve linguistically captured Patong Beach, Thailand. Specifically working on Bangla Road.
So, I’ll start with some background info—
My team and I have been spending time at one of Thailand’s most beautiful beaches. Our ministry is to go to a street called Bangla, known for its club scene, and form relationships with the female bartenders/dancers. Often times these girls work in the sex industry (sad reality that this is an industry), a choice sometimes made by them and sometimes for them.
Bangla Road during the day is relatively tame. People day drink, get mildly rowdy over football (Australian), and play Connect Four.
At night, however, it’s a different story.
Bangla turns into a strip of dirty bars, loud clubs, cheap drinks, strobing lights, multitudes of pole dancers, and people crowding you advertising pretty much any sexual thing you can imagine. I’d say don’t think of it like a family beach vacation, but then we do see whole families—grandparents, parents, children—walking up and down Bangla Road. Odd. But it’d be more accurate to think spring break meets the red light district.
It’s an oxymoronic reality, really. Not just in the day-to-night environment shift. One thing is that the bartenders/dancers we meet seem outside the feeling of shame we’d assume they’d feel for doing what they do. You almost forget it’s weird to have a pole dancer cheer you on from on top of a bar as you play Connect Four against another dancer taking her break. Because it seems so fine to them.
The working women we meet are also simply incredible. Some have kids, some have boyfriends, some left families behind to come here. Whether they just work the bar during the day, or dance at night, or both, or freelance sex for more money, it’s all means to an end for them. Their “end” being to support their families, both here in Patong and in poorer rice farming villages hours away. Working in a bar provides the most money to send home. Their “end” seems a noble cause.
And I should say that the majority of girls I’m speaking of currently have chosen into this life. That might mean they just enjoy working in a bar/dancing, or that their family needs it so they moved and started working.
But there are also girls on Bangla who didn’t choose into it. And you can tell these girls from the rest. They look and dress differently. The Thai dancers wear skimpy shorts and tight tops. But the others, the European/Russian girls, wear nice ball gowns. They stand on the street and hold up signs for their show and try to avoid eye contact with any who aren’t customers. They have been trafficked here. And they always have someone watching them.
There’s one Russian girl who dances on a pole in an 8×8 glass box above their club. That vision in and of itself has consistently struck me as oxymoronic. She wears a puffy tulle skirt and looks like a little ballerina twirling in circles. She looks safe. It’s oddly beautiful and innocent. But then reality gives you a hard shove and you see it all for what it is.
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Thailand is beautiful. The beach is beautiful. The girls on Bangla are beautiful. God is beautiful. But it’s also all really confusing and gut-wrenching and nauseating and makes-you-wanna-get-uncharacteristically-violent anger-inducing.
And I guess that’s where I just have to leave it for this blog. Because I truly don’t understand how we have this kind of place on our beautiful blue marble of a planet. I simply cannot comprehend how people take girls (or boys) from their homes or families, drug them, sell them, and make them think this sort life is all they’re capable of. Or how we got to a place where people sell themselves because their family is starving.
It breaks you. I guess in a good way. But it’d be nice if it could break you to give you a way to then be able to change it.
Maybe that will happen in due time. For now though we will simply settle to be broken about it. To let it hurt us and anger us and sadden us. Because if it didn’t I think we’d be dead.
And may we continue to keep this at the forefront of our minds, letting it us break us until the day we don’t need to be broken anymore.
