I met a friend in Cambodia. Her name is Victory*. I met Victory in a bar one night. You see, Victory is a prostitute. In Cambodian culture, it’s more shameful to be a beggar on the street than to be a woman working in the bars at night, because to Cambodians, at least then you’re earning your own money.
The night I met Victory, 3 people on our team decided to stay outside Dave’s Bar* and pray while me and 2 of my other teammates walked in first to start our first night of bar ministry. I was nervous, but I also knew that bar ministry was something I had dreamed about doing since I read about it in a World Race blog long before I had ever applied.
I had heard about human trafficking and sex trafficking (modern-day slavery) a few years ago, and it made me angry that such a thing could still exist in the world today. I felt determined that I wanted to do something about it, but I wasn’t sure what I could do or how I could get involved until I read about it as part of the ministry I could do on the World Race.
My passion for preventing and doing something about modern-day slavery went deeper than being satisfied with supporting a movement against it (the End It Movement) at Passion 2015 with the extra $20 I had meant to save for souvenirs. I wanted to be part of the action. I wanted to meet these girls and tell them about their worth in Christ, I wanted to share with them my story of what Jesus did for me, and I wanted to be a part of some organization that helped set these women free.
But the night that it actually came down to finally getting in the trenches and realizing this dream of mine, I was a little bit scared and a lot nervous. What was I going to say? Would there be a language barrier? Would I be allowed to pray for a woman or would I be kicked out of the bar for doing so? Would I get a chance to tell her my story? Would I have the courage to?
These are the kinds of questions that swirled in my head as I walked into the bar the night I met Victory. But I still walked in and tried to trust God with where He had me that night. We walked into Dave’s Bar and ordered sodas. None of the women approached us, and we must have seemed out-of-place to the Cambodian women who were trying to flirtatiously work for their money and to the seedy-looking older American and foreign men who were either staring at these women, staring at us, or too wrapped up with one woman in particular to notice. So we walked over to the pool tables where most of the women were gathered and asked to play a game with them.
Victory seemed to enjoy playing pool with us, to get away from the men for a while and have some fun. She’d laugh at us and we’d laugh at ourselves at how bad of pool players we were, and cheer her on for how good she was. It must of been from months or years of practice. She started giving us pointers of where to shoot, whether or not we were on the same team. We were just playing for fun, and so was she.
After a while, she said she was done playing pool. She went to sit at a table by herself, hoping to attract a man, one of her “customers.” I walked over and asked if I could join her. She said yes and we started talking. I wasn’t really sure what to talk about at first, but she seemed eager to talk and showed me some pictures of her kids on her phone. Victory told me that she is 38 years old and she has 2 children, a 15-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. Out of all the women that we met, Victory has seemed the most eager to leave her job at Dave’s Bar*. She told me the first night that I met her that her job was bad and she doesn’t get many customers because she is old and fat. I kept telling her that she is beautiful.
When she told me that she didn’t like her job, I felt hope for Victory. Something I knew that she didn’t was that there was a long term AIM (Adventures in Missions) team member coming to Overflow the very next month, who had a passion for women like Victory and a way to get her out. There was a plan in place that once this team member arrived, she would establish a home for these women to live in and give them an opportunity to develop skills to be a hairdresser or a shopkeeper, etc.
Victory told me that it’s her dream to open a small shop in the Night Market or the Old Market to sell clothes or jewelry, but she doesn’t have the start-up money to open a shop. So she works in the bars, selling herself for money so she can afford to put her two children through school and pay her rent. She told me she lives in one room of a house with her family and the rent is expensive for her. She also told me that sometimes she stays up until 2:00am working in the bars, but she still gets up around 5:00am every morning to get her children ready for school and walk her daughter several miles to her classroom because they can’t afford a tuk tuk or a bike. Victory told me that her son is almost finished with high school, so she’s hoping he’ll get a job when he’s done so he can help her out with the rent. I got to pray for Victory the night I met her, and I left feeling hopeful that she would one day be able to leave Dave’s Bar.
There indeed is hope for Victory to leave this industry. But it wasn’t my job to give her false hope for a home that hadn’t been established yet. My job was to develop a friendship with Victory and get to know her and her story better. We were there to show these women that not all people are bad. That not all people want to use you, take advantage of you, manipulate you, or abuse you. We were there to show them the love of Christ, when hope for a better future was just around the corner.
We were supposed to develop friendships with these women and invite them to get coffee or another public outing, and try to get their phone numbers so we could pass that information on to the long-term team who was coming so they could use that information as a starting point for their ministry.
Praise the Lord that Liz and I were fortunate enough to be able to meet with Victory and her friend Adriana* for coffee one day after a few visits to the bar where they worked! I noticed that at night, Victory usually wears black dresses at Dave’s Bar because she says it’s a slimming color. But when we met with her during the day, she looked like a typical mom with a baseball cap, a tee-shirt, sweat-shirt, and jeans. We asked them about their lives, and we got to share with them a little bit about why were there in Cambodia and explained that we were Christian volunteers (because we weren’t supposed to use the word missionaries) who were traveling for a year to meet people and help people out around the world.
When the opportunity came, I did make a friend in Victory, even though that consisted of a few awkward conversations in the bar where she worked and one opportunity to get coffee with her and her friend outside of their work. I didn’t feel right telling her about the possibility of her getting out of that industry while there was nothing in place yet, and I didn’t get to see her leave that job and be freed. I didn’t even get a chance to tell her about Jesus, although we did tell her we were Christian volunteers and invited her to our Christmas Eve outreach party. She never showed, but she did get a beautiful handmade Christmas card in English and Khmer
telling her that she was invited. Maybe just that was enough to show her that she was loved, that people cared about her, and just a little glimpse of Jesus with a verse about him in the card.
We were at Overflow for the month, and that month God asked us to water. Water the seeds of faith, love, freedom and hope for a better life that had been placed in these women’s hearts. We weren’t called there for a season of harvesting or being part of the process to bring these women to a safer place. We were a stepping stone of establishing trust with these women so the teams that were coming after us could continue to establish trust with them and eventually lead them to freedom if that was God’s plan for their lives.
It’s taken me 2 months to even write this blog because of how much feeling is behind it. When we came to Cambodia, we had no idea that we were going to be doing bar ministry as part of our month there. It is a ministry I dreamed of doing before I ever came on the Race after reading the blogs of Racers before me. I had heard about how there was sex trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia and I hoped that I would get a chance to see what that looked like in real life. I wanted to share my story of hope about Jesus with these women, I wanted to befriend them, and I wanted to see them set free.
I don’t know where Victory is right now. I don’t know whether the long-term missionary that came was able to find her in Dave’s Bar by my description and her phone number. I don’t know whether the house where these women can go to be free of this industry has been established yet. For all I know, she could be going back to the same bar every night, hating her job and yet feeling trapped there because it’s the only place that will pay her enough so she can take care of her kids. I don’t know if she is indeed already free.
But I do know that Jesus knows where she is at this moment. I know that as much as my heart breaks for Victory, His heart breaks for her even more. I know that as much as I want her to be free, Jesus wants that even more. I know that as much as I want Victory to know Jesus, He wants her to know Him even more. And I know that with Jesus, there is hope. So despite me not knowing where she is or how she’s doing right now, with Jesus fighting for her, I know she is victorious.
*Names changed for privacy.
