Have you ever wondered how much your life is worth?
It's not a thought that pops up in the day to day at home for me. It's not really something that pops up ever (until I see those weird online quizes that ask you how much you drink or smoke and waste the time I should have spent studying).
For the women on Bangla Road, it's a question that defines their existence.
Welcome to Thailand, one of the top countries for human trafficking, both internally and externally.
Our ministry this month is taking us right into the darkness. Every night, some of us get dressed (quite a feat in temperatures as high as this), go down to the bar district, order a soda and strike up a conversation with the women in bikinis behind the counter, taking the attention span that a drink will buy, looking at their eyes instead of their bodies and hoping to offer them the chance of a new life.
SHE Ministries helps these women once they decide they want out of the bar lifestyle, offering them housing, job training and saturating them with the Gospel. Our mission: introduce the girls to SHE while simultaneously introducing them to the concept of love and helping to change the course of the future for a woman (and usually her children)… one drink at a time.
So basically, for 80 baht a night, we're buying women. We're getting a huge discount, because the men who buy them for the night pay a substantial amount more- but we're still buying lives for about $2 a pop (not a soda pop, crazy Michiganders).
Pray for us. Pray for these women. Pray for the drinks that we buy night after night, that the $2 we pay make more of an impact than we even see.
"Kristen's ripping chains off women while I'm sitting there sipping on a coke."
— Ruth, after her first night in the bars
