Working on Bangla Road

We were dropped off in Patong and we headed for the first bar in groups of three. Thai men flashed pornographic images in our faces, inviting us to come see a ‘peep’ show. Husbands passed by holding their wives hands as they ogled the women in short skirts and lace tank tops. Parents guided their 5 and 7-year-old boys down the sidewalk by the lady-boy bar. Two blonde teenage girls had their photo taken in front of the red lights, excited for the wild night ahead of them. A young curly-haired girl about the age of four, stood in amazement as she watched three women grind on poles and each other for an audience of men. Her parents were standing right beside her and had intentionally brought her here.

 

 

The shock of this sight is more than I ever expected to see. The parents who think it’s okay to expose their small children to cross-dressing men, sex and half naked women never existed in my mind before I came  here. I had an idea of what the ‘red light district’ was going to be like, but I always anticipated that the people who frequented these areas would be old perverted foreign men. Reality is that they are only a small portion of the population on Bangla road.

We walked into our first bar and sat down to order a coke. We started talking to a few of the women and men would walk by, groping the women as they passed. All of the Thai women would cheer and invite them over for a drink. Those men are where they made their real living of about $30/night. Otherwise, they would make less than 3 dollars per night serving drinks at the bar.

 

It’s the rainy season, low season for tourism here in Thailand, so we have many more opportunities to talk to the women at the bars because there aren’t as many men here to purchase them for the night. We’ve gone down to the red light district three times so far, meeting women, playing games like Jenga and Connect Four with them, and telling them about SHE (Self Help and Empowerment). SHE is the organization that our women’s team is working with in Phuket, Thailand. An English couple began this organization where they and groups like ours intentionally go to the bars to meet women who are prostitutes, get to know them and ask if they’d like another option besides selling themselves. If they say yes, then we invite them to see and work at the SHE facility. Once they come to the facility, they can live and work here or sometimes they just choose to go back home to their families (usually a northern province far from Phuket). Just a few of the job options are administrative tasks, baking cookies, making and selling jewelry and cards and they also train women to work in hotels.

 

Sharon and Mark (the English couple) also have a morning devotional every day to teach the woman about Jesus. Wednesday and Friday evenings they have a bible study. We’ve also been helping with these and doing some manual labor around the facility. I can’t believe this is our last month, but I couldn’t pick a better ministry to be doing in our final month than this.