“Step Ahead is a Christian based integrated community development
organization, based in Thailand, focused on partnering with the working
poor to see comprehensive and sustainable transformation.
Established in September 2002, Step Ahead first launched a holistic
micro-enterprise development program in Klong Toey slum communities.
In 2004, Step Ahead expanded its core activities in response to the
devastation caused by the December 26 Asian Tsunami, opening the Khao
Lak office and offering education, community development, and
alternative livelihood programs.
In 2009, Step Ahead once again expanded its reach, opening the
Pattaya office with a primary focus on economic development activities
for women at risk.
In
Pattaya, fifteen women are making new lives for themselves, making
ITSERA woven leather purses, bringing them freedom and a better life.”
Pattaya. Known around the world as Thailand’s number one sun, sea and
sex destination, it is home to at least 20,000 male, female and child
prostitutes. During tourist ‘high season’ every November to March, about
one million visitors crowd Pattaya’s bars, nightclubs, massage parlors
or steam baths. If you talk statistics, it can seem hopeless. But when
you go into Tamar Center, you see people. Lovely ladies who’ve chosen to
change the direction of their lives and in doing so, have found
dignity, hope and a future.
Tamar Center is a center for help, healing and hope, offering the
ladies jobs in their card-making program, hairdressing salon, bakery,
restaurant and other income-earning activities, as well as giving
courses in life skills, English and knowing God. Many ladies who found
new life at Tamar asked them to please go with them to their villages in
northeast Thailand
(Isaan) so their families can be changed too. Tamar said ‘yes’, and
after two years of working with those families and villages to see
reconciliation happen, relationships built, and children’s program
begun, they have now opened their first Prevention Center in the Isaan.
This will initially offer childcare for single mothers, followed by job
training, all with a Godly foundation.
Tamar’s healing arms are opened wider in Pattaya now too. In November
2009, they were able to buy property on Soi 6, one of the darkest,
saddest, most hopeless bar sections in the city. Through their Tamar
Hair Salon, English classes, Counselling and Prayer Rooms, the light of
hope is coming to the people on that street. That’s what L.I.F.E. is all
about.”
Nok’s story-
“It’s a sad story. A story that is repeated over and over again across
the nation of Thailand. Nok is a young mother in the Isaan, the poor
northeaster part of the nation. She is married, happily she thinks, with
one child. Then the father finds a new ‘wife’. Suddenly, she is alone,
with a young child, no means of support. Her former husband does not
give even one penny to help. What can she do? Under great pressure from
her parents, she is forced to leave her 4 year old daughter with them
and go to Pattaya.
in the bars and ‘marry a foreign husband’. What they get instead is
prostitution. Standing on the street or sitting in bars trying to lure
men in to drink and have sex. After one month, Nok couldn’t do it
anymore. Desperate, she cried out for help. The staff at Tamar Center
heard her. Nok was accepted into their 3 month counseling/job retraining
program. It was a time of tears and healing, a time of finding she has
value, her life has purpose. After the course, Nok worked in the Tamar
Center coffee shop. But Nok’s mother kept calling her, demanding money,
not for Nok’s daughter, but for the mother’s drinking habit. Recently,
Tamar’s outreach team went with Nok back to her village. There, in a
time of tears and forgiveness, Nok and her family were reconciled. Her
mother no longer calls demanding money. The only calls she makes are to
find out if Nok is OK. That’s. Nok. That’s what L.I.F.E. is all about.”
