When you were little and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, what did you say? Did you tell them you wanted to be a prostitute and sell your body to strangers to make ends meet? I doubt it.
Everyone has dreams for their lives, and for some people those dreams become reality. But for others, like my new friend, life gets in the way.
Two weeks ago I was sitting on a couch in a bar in Chiang Mai, Thailand, praying for an opening to talk to one of the girls there. I had never done this kind of work and had no idea how I was supposed to start, so I prayed that God would just send someone my way who needed help. Then a girl flopped down on the couch next to me. “Let’s talk,” she said. With almost no prompting from me, she proceeded to tell me her entire life story in detail over the next hour. You name it, it’s happened to her. She has lived an incredibly tragic life, but she is still full of hopes and dreams for her future and a better life. For the sake of her safety, I’m going to call her Mae, and my next few blogs will be dedicated to telling you her story and the ongoing story of what God is doing in her life right now.
In our first conversation that night I heard most of her story. She’s been in Chiang Mai for about sixteen years, ever since she moved to Thailand from Burma. I asked her why she came to Thailand, and she told me that she didn’t know. “I guess my mother must have wanted money.” They never had enough money when she was a child, and she used to lie awake at night worrying because she knew they didn’t have money for rice for the next day. She told me that her family was very lazy, and that she was the only one who bothered to worry about things. “I’ve always been taking care of twelve people…all my life.”
She came to Chiang Mai, started working in the bars, dancing and going home with customers, and sent almost all her money home to Burma for years to provide for her family and her two daughters. Somewhere along the way she had two girls who are now 14 and 16. Since children aren’t exactly an asset in this business, she sent them both back to live with her mother in Burma immediately after they were born. A few years back she got tired of providing for her family. She told her brother to tell them all that she had died, so she hasn’t seen her daughters in five years. “Someday when I have enough money I want to go back to Burma, get them, and bring them here to Thailand with me so that they can get an education and become something better than a bar girl.”
The rest of her life story consists of a five year relationship with a man from Denmark who beat her, a deep drug addiction that put her out on the streets, a stint in a mental hospital because of a misunderstanding, drug rehab, her new boyfriend being beaten up by a stalker sent by the old boyfriend from Denmark, and her resolution that she would be alone forever. She went from mostly just dancing for tips to having to go home with customers every night just to pay the bills. “Most of the men are nasty. They are not nice, but I have to like them. That’s how I make money.”
The bar owner constantly tells her how stupid she is because she is not willing to seduce and manipulate customers in the ways required. She does not dress in scanty clothing like the other girls, but instead prefers nice pants and a tasteful button-down shirt. “I don’t like to wear the sexy clothes…I feel dirty.” They tell her she is too old, too stupid, and too ugly for men to like her. She doesn’t make enough money for the bar, and even less for herself. “I have too good of a heart to really try with the men, so they tell me I’m so stupid.”
As her life story came to a close, I asked her if she could do anything with her life what it would be. She looked down for awhile, and I awkwardly sipped my Coke Zero, unsure if I had crossed her invisible line. Just when I thought she would never answer, she looked up with tears in her eyes. She just stared at me for awhile, and finally she told me her dream. “If I could do anything, I would be a teacher. I would go back to the town in Burma where my grandmother grew up and start a school for girls so that they could get an education and not have to do this. There is an old, abandoned temple there that no one uses. We could put the school there. But I’m not smart…I only went to a year and a half of school when I was young. I love to learn, and I always steal books and memorize them so that no one can ever take my knowledge from me. I grew up speaking Burmese, but when I came here I had to learn Thai, English, and some French to talk to customers. But I’m not smart enough to have a school. I’m just a bar girl.”
I promised her that she was more than smart enough, and I told her that her dreams are wonderful and that they are possible. Then I told her about a book I read called The Road to Lost Innocence about a Cambodian girl who was sold into the sex trade and grew up to start a rescue home for young girls who were being trafficked. She also went back to the town where she grew up in rural Cambodia, took an abandoned building, and started a school for girls. Her eyes lit up. “That can really happen? She was like me and that happened for her? Maybe someday someone will write a book about my life and you can read it.”
I promise you Mae, if that book is ever written, I’ll buy the first copy.
To be continued…
