My favorite part of this month was the friends that I made. Their names are Quan, Nam and Mint. They are such beautiful people!!! Here’s how it all started. My teammate Sydney and I noticed that there was one corner in particular on bar street where the prostitutes hung out. Friends in the making right? Yes. So we went one night to talk to one of the girls, but while we were approaching she got into a car with a customer. We sat down on a bench feeling defeated, but asked the Lord over and over to get her out of the car. Then after couple of minutes she walked right by us! Yeah Jesus! So that’s how it all started. We asked the girls if we could bring them dinner one night, and that turned into stopping by every night and hanging out with them while they waited around on the street corner for customers.
The women turned out to be “lady boys”. Pretty self-explanatory, they are men who decided to be women, and go to varying extremes to walk out life in that identity. Some go as far as having sex-change operations while others don’t go that far. They are kind of a marginalized people in Thailand. They can’t get any jobs with the government and have a hard time getting jobs outside of that. I hate talking about them like they are anything other than precious, anything other than valuable. At the beginning of the month I saw them as prostitutes. After a night of hanging out with them they became my friends. It got harder and harder to stand on the streets with them while they tried to scratch out a living, night after night, out of desperation.
Two of the girls told us their stories over dinner the other night. Both decided they wanted to be women when they were little kids. Their families were and are supportive of their decision. They’ve ended up selling their bodies because they’ve found no other option to support themselves and their families. They hate their jobs. Abba’s heart is after their heart. Their sexual preference is not their identity, they are people, and they are oppressed This is unacceptable to me, that anyone anywhere should have to sell their body in order to survive. I want to know what redemption looks like for them, and what it looks like for the women who work on the streets at home? I wonder if it’s as simple as telling one girl she is to precious to sell her body and she can live in your home until …..I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about this month.
