Tomorrow we will be leaving to go to Pattaya, which is a tourist spot that stretches about 15 km along the Gulf of Thailand, just a little south of Bangkok. There is an estimated 2 million tourists visiting every year. We’ll be working with a organization there that helps girls and women in the area involved in prostitution. During debrief we actually saw a man wearing a shirt that said, ‘Good Guys go to Heaven, Bad Guys go to Pattaya.’
The statistics are really sad and scary. Right now, the estimated number of prostitutes in Thailand are hard to get an exact number on because prostitution is in fact illegal here. However, the estimated range is somewhere between 300,000 and 2.8 million! Pattaya has an estimated 20,000 women and girls involved in prostitution.
The organization that we’ll be working with goes out several times a week to visit the girls at the bars that they work at so that they can build the relationships with these ladies. If the ladies choose at any point to leave the life of prostitution, they have the option of going through a training program that will help them obtain skills needed to pursue another career. They even have a nursery on-site so the women with no child care can still go through the classes.
Like I mentioned in an earlier blog, we’ll be the first World Race group going to this location to do ministry. Please pray that God covers us and allows us to see only what He wants us to see and puts people in our path that He wants us to minister to. Thanks!
