WARNING! This post contains graphic content unsuitable for children. It is an unflinching account of one night from my team’s ministry with victims of human trafficking in the sex trade of Thailand. The names of those involved have been changed to protect them.
“A girl’s got to keep herself beautiful,” he says, balancing in black stilettos while he rubbed his stomach over his dress.
“…sure do.” I reply, and try to recover from my dumbfounded pause.
It was the first of many times that night I’d ask myself “How would Christ respond to this?”
His name is Kate. Kate works as a ladyboy, and if I hadn’t seen the three glasses of wine he’d pounded in quick succession and heard the comments he made about his looks and seen the way he constantly stopped to look in the mirror or adjust his long auburn hair or measure his stomach, I’d almost believe he was happy. Almost.
Sitting next to me is a young girl in denim overalls and pale blue contacts. Her name is Jenny. She doesn’t look more than 16 years old, but I don’t bother asking her age. She’s been coached to give an age either 18 or older. I sip my tonic water and turn back to her, continuing our conversation about her family and what she liked to do for fun outside of what she does in the “living room” upstairs.
When Jenny’s awake and not working, which is always in the afternoon, she likes to take long moped rides up into the mountains. She likes the outdoors. She has friends all over town, she says. She even has three boyfriends who take care of her.
Behind me, Kate screams something obscene and launches out of his chair toward a man walking past the entrance. He tries to grab the man’s arm and pull him inside. He tries to get close and kiss his cheek. Annoyed, the man shakes Kate off, throwing him a sideways glare and beginning to stomp away past the bar. But not before Kate runs up and slaps his butt.
I tense when the man turns around, his face a mask of restrained rage. But all the man does is spit out some words between clenched teeth. The only one I catch is “fag.” He stomps away, and Kate saunters back to the bar with a smug half grin. It’s an act if ever I’ve seen one.
Again, I turn back to Jenny. We’ve exchanged contact information. She wants to ride mopeds with me and my friends and get lunch together some day. I ask her how long she’s been working here. She doesn’t understand the question, so I pull up google maps and show her the state I live in back in the U.S. I ask if she can show me where she’s from. The conversation continues, helped along by google maps and a receipt pad where we write our questions and answers. She can read and write English better than speak it.
Kate walks to the man sitting down the bar from Jenny. Now I can see as well as hear everything he’s doing. The man, whose shape isn’t far from perfectly round, looks like one half of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum duo from Alice in Wonderland. Tweedledee is a John, and he’s here tonight for a ladyboy. Specifically, for Kate, and Kate acts eager to please. In a moment, Kate is all over the man’s lap, gyrating forcefully and yelling vulgarities and grinding into his groin.
It’s all I can do to focus on the young girl and what she’s trying to say in her sing-song, Thai accented broken English. And when the slapping noises and derisive laughter start, I tell myself to just focus on her eyes. Concentrate on who I see in those two cyan tinted windows, and listen to her words and the heart behind them. And I know then how important this conversation is, what a few minutes of talking to someone who wants nothing from her might come to mean to Jenny.
Those eyes belong to someone too young to have seen and experienced everything their owner has. Less than two decades old, and she’s already spending her afternoons battling massive hangovers and drinking enough in the evenings so she won’t care about what happens to her in those wee hours of the morning when nothing good happens.
I’ve been there before, as far as the drinking goes, but not in nearly the same circumstances and not driven by the same wounds. I wasn’t as young then, either. Still, the fear and the depression are familiar, as is the over-bubbly joyful exterior used to suppress them. I begin to see how much Christ loves her, that He invades darkness like what’s happening around us just to be with her, just to listen to her, just to let her know He’s there.
And that makes it all worthwhile.
Even when I feel Kate’s arm slide around my neck to pull me in from behind. Even when, as I gently take his arm and begin placing it on the bar, he grabs the side of my face with his other hand and forcefully pulls my head toward his puckered lips. I successfully pull away just in time, but I don’t give the satisfaction of a glare.
His aggression is the same as Jenny’s bubbly exterior, just a way to deal with the pain and the confusion of his existence. The pain, for Kate, finds its root in the Enemy’s lie – the lie that he’d be more valuable as a woman than as the man he was created to be, and even then only as an object of lust to be used for a night and tossed aside for the next guy. Of course he’s angry. Of course he loathes himself. He shouldn’t, but he sees himself through the lens of a lie.
So again I turn back toward Jenny, choosing to focus on her instead of my right to feel violated and angered. There’s time for that later, away from here. And I know then Christ has purpose here, or I would not have been able to do that.
It’s not right, but It’s nothing compared to what Kate and Jenny deal with every night.
Kate alternates between his post at the entrance and pressing up against Tweedledee, but I’m listening to Jenny tell me about her western friends and about how she gets to see her Mom two months from now. And as Tweedledee’s equally round friend, Tweedledum, saunters in and takes part in the scene with Kate over casual conversation about where he’s going to “hook up” and “get some” later, Jenny and I finish our conversation and confirm our plans to meet with my team some time for lunch and moped rides. Then, as I leave my barstool, Jenny invites me to the “living room.” My heart sinks. I gently decline.
I wish I could say the night had a happy ending. I wish I could tell you Kate didn’t have to entertain lustful men for the rest of the evening, or that the men realized their own brokenness and the effects of their selfishness. I wish I could tell you that in the weeks that followed, Jenny realized her worth as a human being and found help from our organization and a relationship with Christ. But often that’s not how this works.
Often you don’t see the victories while you’re there. You have to dig deep and focus on the reasons that make this worthwhile. Reasons like Terry, the housekeeper at our hostel who used to work at the bars like the women we chat with at night. She talked with over 3 different teams over many months before she realized her self worth and left the bars and found in Christ the acceptance she’d always craved.
That’s why we keep reaching out. Christ never gives up on us. We shouldn’t give up either.
If you’d like to partner with us in ministering to victims of human trafficking, you can do so with prayers, encouragement, and for those who are able, funds to help us pay the bars for time spent talking with the men and women working there. Please follow this link to find out more about how you can help change someone’s life for the better in one of the darkest places on Earth: The Thailand “Slush Fund”
A big shoutout to those of you who already donated to my team’s ministry via PayPal. Because of you, we have been able to take our bar friends on outings outside of their bar workspace, giving them rest and friendship they otherwise would not have. Your help has already made a world of difference to those in need.
