#SHE MinistryThis month a lot of new things are happening, new continent, new climate, and at least for this month, a new team! Here in Thailand our squad remixed it up a little bit and our guys are doing a “manistry” month so they all joined up on one team and then we spilt the rest of the girls up into totally new teams as well. For this month I am on a team with Kim Butler, team leader extraordinaire, Kelly Mulderig, the finance finagler, and Ashley Huber, the ice cream caper. We have already enjoyed each other so much and I feel so blessed to spend this month with them.
We may or may not have gone to see the Hunger Games…
Okay so now that I’ve got the intros out of the way let me tell you a bit about the ministry we are working with this month. SHE Ministry (Self-Help and Empowerment) http://www.shethailand.org/ was started about seven years ago by Mark and Sharon Biddell, to provide women working in the sex industry with other job options. I feel that this ministry is incredibly blessed by the Lord, they are so prayer focused, and we spend hours a day in prayer and worship to prepare ourselves to go out into the darkness that is Bangla Road (the street where the bars that we minister in) and to pray light and truth over that whole area and all the people there. The women who do choose to leave the bars after hearing about the ministry are given a place to live and a job making jewelry or journals that are then sold to support the ministry. In the six years or so that the ministry has been working on Bangla Rd. over 150 women have been brought out of the bars. Currently on Bangla Rd. there are about 1,500 women working as bar girls.
We are also helping SHE build a new center to be able to house more women, for a missions training school, as well as a coffee shop which will bring in more revenue for the ministry. On the nights we are going out to the bars (never thought I’d say that in a blog) we work at the current center helping put together packaging for the jewelry the women make, cooking for all the volunteers here, and pretty much anything else they can come up with for us to do. On the nights we aren’t going out to the bars we go help with the construction of the new center. So far I’ve weed-eated(sp?) large portions of bush, and cut up rebar with a metal grinder, fun times.
So we are doing a few different things this month but all of them have been really great so far, and I can’t wait to tell you more about this month!
