This weekend we got to take a bunch of the local kids to a basketball game. Jeff’s, our ministry contact, son is a star on the number 1 college basketball team and he gets the kids tickets for the games. It is a lot of fun for the kids and tons of fun for us as well. We get to hangout with the kids for the whole day!
Unfortunately it wasn’t all fun. After the game had ended we were out front of the stadium waiting for our ride to get there when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turnaround and look down to a young girl with her hand outstretched, a plastic grocery bag attached on her arm. Her eyes are sunk into her head from lack of food, she has inch long dirty fingernails, and she is wearing a dirty dress that looks like it hasn’t been washed in years.
Jeff’s daughter who runs girls home here is next to me and starts a conversation up. After some talking we find out that she is sixteen years and is out begging for food, money or whatever else she can get her hands on. Upon further talk we find out she is pregnant with not her first, not her second, but her third child. A sixteen year old that’s about to have three kids!
That means that she most likely had her first child at the age of fourteen years old if not younger.
I was in absolute shock and didn’t know what to do; I still don’t know what to do. Please pray for her and the many many more like her on the streets of the Philippines. These encounters happen quite often and it is such a tragedy. The Philippines is a country plagued by sexual sin. Help me pray against that as a whole. Pray to God to free the Philippines of the sexual sin that seems to hover over the country.
Besides the fact that it is not uncommon to see a 16 year old pregnant or to find that the main caregivers of a baby are both under the age of 15, the country of the Philippines is also plagued by lady-boys, the gender that is both man and women. The country recognizes this as a possible sex :O. That blows my mind.
The sad part is that most of the time these very confused people have dark dark backgrounds in sex slavery and prostitution. Often they were little boys severely sexually abused who are lost beyond words. There isn’t any counseling here for that kind of thing, even if they could afford it.
Once you hear an explanation like that for the reason they are what they are the only thing you can really do is pray. I think I am sharing this to bring awareness, and to get more prayer against it.
