Over the week of May 14-18 I had the opportunity to work alongside Wipe Every Tear.
On the World Race, they have something called PVT designed towards around month 7 of our 9 month journey. PVT stands for Parent Vision Trip- it’s basically a mission trip with your parents. Parents fly out to wherever their Racer currently is in the world and they get the opportunity to come alongside their child and do ministry together. It’s this beautiful image of family and togetherness, a genuinely connecting time for mother, father, and child. So, my squad’s PVT was here in the Philippines about two months ago with an organization called Wipe Every Tear. Wipe Every Tear’s goal is to fight sex trafficking in the Philippines. What they do is offer women that are stuck in bars, strip clubs, or prostitution of any kind the opportunity to live an altnerative life. That alternate life that they offer looks like living in one of their current 3 homes where around 20-30 other rescued women live, healing treatments, schooling (from wherever they last stopped their schooling, from elemantary classes til college, each woman is able to pick up right from where they last stopped til completion), three meals a day, a warm bed to call their own, community, sisterhood- ALL FOR FREE! Not only that, but each day they get an allowence so that they can save their own money while also sending some back home to their families and often times children. To put it best, six days ago one of their captions on Instagram was “We have found that good news is a safe and clean house, a comfy bed, three meals a day, medical care, dental care, college tuition, books, and all she needs for a great future. Jesus is just so good!”
All this to say, PVT is a beautiful thing. I was expectant and desired so deeply for my parents to come and visit this country that I’m calling home and loving, for us to be on mission together for even just a couple days, and to fall into their hugs for the first time in months. I come from a family of 8 and on top of that my parents both work hard for our family, so I knew several things: even if they were able to get a week off of work they would have to somehow figured out a way for all of the kids to be looked after and taken care of then there was the obstacle of either raising support or taking money out of savings to be able to cover the costs of traveling and lodging and meals and any ministry expenses that are in the in betweens.
I was praying for my parents for months- I began to feel confident in my hope that it would all work out beautifully, but when the last day of the deadline came to sign up, they just couldn’t go. Honestly it’s a miracle that anyone’s parents can make it out to a foreign country for a week in the middle of the year! It all made sense, but that didn’t change that my momma, dad, and I were each sad. I grieved this loss- this loss of my joyful anticipation of reuniting with my parents in this special way and for a couple of days joining as one heart and one mind in order to be a small part of fighting sex trafficking which I have grown to be especially passionate about (check out my first blog written way back in week one of this thing, from the Dominican Republic. It’s called “hey momma, I’m alive!!!,” if you want to hear about the first time my heart really broke for sex trafficking)…I grieved it all.
I began to use that week where I was unable to serve with Wipe Every Tear and instead stayed at my ministry site with the other “non PVTers” as a week to pray very intentionally for my family, for their growth, for their joy to expontentially deepen and widen, for them to be face to face with a completely new kind of spiritual ferver and passion, for there to be a spirit of unity and peace like never before within every member of my family. I prayed these exact same things for my brothers and sisters on my squad, whether their parents were able to come or not. It was a sweet time where God gave me this insane hope that He would move mountains within my parents in their every day, ordinary, eating, sleeping, going to work, life that they’re living the suburbs of Georgia. He whispered to my soul that He did not need to take them across the globe to speak to them, that He did not need to do anything extravegent to change everything about their lives! That to me is POWERFUL. More powerful than God taking my parents across the world to show them things like overwhelming poverty, injustice, and heartbreak. He didn’t need them to go all the way to the Philippines to feel something or be ignited! He can and will do all of those things in our home. In our three story, middle class home. In the glory of the mundane! In the hidden glory all around us! Gets me ectatic every single time!!
Yes, that’s sweet, but there’s more.
That week was much like what the Lord had revealed to me with my parents. It was a special week of seeing God in my own mundain- at the ministry site that I am very familiar with and had at the time already been living at and serving alongside for a month with two more months ahead of me. I was given fresh eyes that week- eyes that looked around as if they were seeing it all for the very first time! It was like falling in love for the first time, like the very first date, being all kinds of overwhelmed by the beauty sitting right across the table from me. I could write a blog about that alone. Yet, it was hard. I wanted to see my momma. See her beautiful, always tanned face- her white smile, and hold her hands with her always painted nails. I wanted to hear my dad’s voice not just over the phone, rub his old bald head for good luck, and smell the cologne on his shirt and his minty mouth wash breath. I wanted to be a part of a ministry like Wipe Every Tear. I wanted to be on the frontlines of this hideos war humanity is fighting day after day after day. I wanted to give Hell a reason to wince as Heaven threw a punch at the gut of sex slavery up and down the strip of bars on Walking Street in Angeles City. I wanted these things. It’s hard to want something so badly and it not be your time.
And yet.
Here I am, sitting on the fourth floor of the campus I call home (PSA- I began writing this a week and a half ago, but these last days of the Race have been full of all kinds of sweetness, so I have gotten greatly distracted- I am now laying on a bunk at a hostel in Manila while the city is wild with noise at 1:03 am), with the dimmed night sky shining with its stars and the city scape twinkling with a dreamy kind of charm the way it does every evening around here- the soundtrack of this being the water from the pool below rushing and the cars through the streets zooming (I swear the Philippines never sleeps)…Here I am, typing about how I didn’t have to miss a thing!
There was so much life change from PVT and there were so many guys and girls from my squad that loved their time with Wipe Every Tear so much that they contacted the staff asking if there was any way that our World Race squad would ever be able to partner with them in their work again while we were still in the Philippines. Wipe Every Tear got back to them and said that any of us could join a group from a church in Atlanta that were coming in to do bar ministry with them for 4 nights in Angeles City much like they had at their PVT. Everyone was stoked- half of our squad decided to contact our ministry hosts and ask for permission to take those four days off and we got it approved to work with them.
I almost declined the offer simply because I didn’t have the estimated $300 dollars to cover all of the costs from buses and jeepneys over to Angeles from Cainta plus the hotel room plus meals plus the drinks that you have to buy to talk to any of the girls in the bars. But, I couldn’t get myself to decline an opportunity like this because of something as fleeting as money. So, I did what any millennial would do and went to Instagram. I posted some videos on my story talking about the basics of what my friends and I will be doing and what Wipe Every Tear is and what they stand for, ending with a simple written text with the information they’d need to electronically donate any amount of money to me, promising them that I would steward their money with honor. You wouldn’t believe it! I posted those videos a little past 4 o’clock in the afternoon here, meaning it was 4 am back home, I ran down stairs for supper and then headed over to the Children’s Home for a movie night and once I was back by around 8 o’clock there was roughly $375 sitting in my account- mostly all from strangers who happen to follow me on Instagram and all before 9 am! I’m always humbled by generosity. It blows me away and refreshes everything within my soul…honestly it’s all ineffable.
All this to say, we headed to Angeles City.
I’ve been struggling to find the words it takes to capture anything that I saw or felt with any kind of accuracy to the sincerity and depth of what I experienced. I’ll start with explaining what we even did: the 22 or so “Racers” and couple dozen men and women from the church along with rescued Wipe Every Tear staff and the founder, Kenny Sacht, would gather at Bella Goose Cafe for dinner, story telling, prayer, and worship at 6 pm. Bella Goose is a beautiful example of creativity in ministry- it’s a cafe that supports Wipe Every Tear through employing women formerly found in the bars along Walking Street while also giving a certain percentage of its profit to the organization. Their iced caramel salted macchiatos are divine and the worship that happened in that cafe was like I was sitting in a house church in the days of Acts with all of the passionate apostles and disciples way back when- dimly lit, yet brighter than the sun in joy and zeal and righteous anger towards the atrocious realities behind the doors and curtains of these strip clubs. After all of this, we would split into teams of about 6 and two of the girls that have gone through/are currently going through Wipe Every Tear’s program join each group as a translator and guide. We walk from the cafe to the beginning of the strip of Walking Street. There are times when someone feels like the Lord gave them a name of a bar and there are times when we would just walk for a bit and randomly walk inside one of them. We’d walk through the doors of all kinds of always dark, thick with smoke rooms with music blaring and girls dancing on stages or polls big and small. We’d find a seat and order something to drink (a drink is your “ticket” through the doors- we’d order things like juice or teas or chocolate milk or sodas). I’d look at the stage, trying to look women in the eyes instead of at their scantily clad bodies while internally praying a simple prayer, “God, who do you want me to talk to?” Then, I’d call a girl down. When you call a girl down what you’re doing is telling her that you chose her out of all of the others on stage and that you want her for some reason,
typically for an evening or maybe just an hour, but whether it be a couple minutes or a whole night, there is one common denominator: the client can do WHATEVER he or she desires. As long as they pay, the power is theirs. Money is filthy in power here. There’s this song that I heard by Corey Kilgannon as he strummed and sang as the opening act of a concert I went to last winter called Corporate Eyes. It played in my head over and over, bar after bar, girl after girl, night after night, over my time in Angeles City. This one line specifically- “I’ve payed with one dollar bills that have seen more than they should.” Those words made me look at the pesos on the floor, the ones men would shove into women’s underwear or bras like she was some kind of coin machine that you crank and candy falls into your hands like kids do in shops…the pesos thrown from the upper floor onlooking stages, much like a gladiator’s arena, full of gore and horrors- the pesos float down onto arenas that dozens of girls are forced to dance on and are watched all through the night, no days off…as these pesos float from upper floors, the girls fight one another for it. One woman said, “The men throw us money and we turn into animals for it.” Oh, the things these pesos have seen. the things these pesos are seeing as you read these words in this very moment…All that they’ve been used for, how they couldn’t choose what they were used for, they had to see it all- the pretty and the ugly, the good and the bad, with no say at all.
Those pesos sit on tables that men from all over the world sit at to stare at women as they’re forced to flaunt and move with a threat of abuse of all kinds if they do not obey their mamasants (mamasants are like the managers of the women, the more women a bar has, the more mamasants you’ll see- they’re like the farmers of cattle, the alpha wolf of the pack, forced to recruit women from vulnerable provinces stuck in the cycle of poverty because they’re most likely to jump at the opportunity of any job advertised to them), the discipline varies from physical abuse to being forced the next night to be the one that goes to the hotel with the man everyone refuses to go with, being sexually abused by their manager, losing their job, and plenty of more unspeakables that I’m not aware of. And you’d think the mamasants would be the enemy, yet after talking to some of them, they were just as hurt as the dancers. They were just as broken and abused, hated what they had to do, yet did it all in sacrificial love for their families. Every single person so human (there’s so much weight to that as I type this, I hope you understand what I mean by each person being “so human”).
The real enemy is something much greater than mamasants and men. “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). The enemy is the Devil.
Some realizations: for the women, this is all money. This is food on the table. This is clothes on their backs. This is a way for their children to go to school. This is a roof over their heads, money to pay for their mama’s medical bills, and savings for the school they dream of going to every night before they lay their heads down to sleep.
It’s not something they choose or desire. It’s a last resort or a twisted lie. It’s deception or daring to go to the extreme to keep their family fed.
The truth is this is a Red Light district.
red-light dis·trict
?red ‘lit ?distrikt/Submit
noun
an area of a town or city containing many brothels, strip clubs, and other sex businesses.
I also read, “The term red-light district originates from the red lights that were used as signs of brothels.”
Stories Under the Red Lights: this could be a novel. All of the stories of the girls 18 til whatever age that deems them no longer desirable in one way or another. The stories of why they have scars here or their dream of starting a resturaunt or the way that they aborted three babies to keep their job only because there was no way they could afford taking off months on end of work let alone figure out a way to pay for the little one to be watched through the nights when “mommy has work.” The stories of the hopes they came to Angeles City with compared to the harsh realities that they’re living in. The stories of showing up to work as if it was a normal evening just to find out that men from Europe had rented out the whole bar just to watch her pole dance for hours upon hours on end; their money meant they could do absolutely anything their hearts desired, so when they said to dance with nothing on, she couldn’t say no, when each man wanted to spend his special time with her, she couldn’t say no…the horror and lack of trust that rises within her spirit to even speak of that night again. The way she ordered chocolate milk instead of tequila and laughed til tears came to her eyes in the middle of everyone, the hardest she’s laughed in ages, maybe the hardest she’s laughed ever. The way she asked me to dance to Bruno Mars on stage instead of her because she’s exhausted after 16 years of being stuck in the same old bar, being stared at every night and the way she laughed as all the eyes were off of her and the other half dressed girls just as tired as her dancing against all those mirrors in between the poles and spot lights, the way it felt to take the eyes off of them for even three songs…The man that is on summer vacation from his kindergaten class that he’s the teacher of. The man with a daughter my age. The twenty girls standing shoulder to shoulder fighting to impress someone enough to get a couple more pesos while the one stands in the dead center miserable, with goosebumps from no clothes, wearing her beat up heart on her sleeve. The girl that humms her favorite song that she sang at the front of the stage for her church’s youth group back when she was on worship team before she got taken away for this “promise of a new job,” the dainty silver cross she still wears around her neck. Or the older that danced in front of her virgin little sister all night long as more customers came in and out. The protection I saw in each move and each interaction with any of the men. There are chronicles worth of Stories Under the Red Lights.
Prayers I prayed during the quiet moments of the bars: “God, let me see them in the daylight.” Let me see their faces in the mid afternoons! Let me talk to these men when they’re not in this mindset they’re currently in as I see them now.
“God, let this never satisfy. May they feast and devour and never be satisfied.” Let them feast on their flesh’s cravings! Let them eat and devour the way that they are tonight, yet leave their mouth watering with an appetite for REAL love, REAL togetherness, REAL purpose, REAL passion. God, liberate them one by one. Woman and man alike, Filipino or foreign. Redeem the broken and speak to them the way You know they’ll hear best. Fill them up. Quench their thirst.
If I had to end these words with something, I’d end it something like this, Wipe Every Tear is unlike anything I have ever been a part of. It is a ministry of celebration like nothing I have ever seen before, of wild love, of dancing like fools, of simple conversations coming from hearts who’s deepest desire is to ressurect their spirits with the simple Gospel of Jesus: love. I’ve never done anything like it. I’m blessed. Blessed to have the family that I do. Blessed to have parents who work without ceasing for the family that they love. Blessed by their display of sacrifice and commitment. I am also blessed that God never lets me miss a thing. One of my friends here on the Race named Zach Thayer said, “There’s no FOMO in the will of God.” At first I laughed because “FOMO” is tossed around jokingly often, yet when my ears really listened to what he just said, I realized how much truth that held. I’ve been meditating on it ever since and seeing it to be truth time and time and time and time again. How glorious!!
