Saturday night and Bangla road is bustling with tourists and Thais, each one selling or buying something. The lights are flashing with their usual neon glow, the music blares at it’s overbearing decibel, the crowd surges around me in the same rush as it has every other time I’ve been down this street: But something is different about tonight. The men and women who hold the laminated price cards for shows that have to do with a ping pong ball and the unmentionables of women seem to be out in hoards tonight. With every five steps I take someone else is in my face saying the same thing, “You want to see a Ping Pong show, lady?” The answer is a stern, “No!”. It’s always no. I feel like I need a sign or a t-shirt that reads in big bold letters, “No, I don’t want to see a ping pong show! No no no no!” As frustration and anger builds inside of me towards these people who walk around peddling the dignity of women, I feel God taking it and turning into a resolve, a drive to do something with this night, to make this night atypical. There is something in the air, in the atmosphere, that again imparts that tonight is going to be different.
A couple hours later and we’re at a bar on Soi Sea Dragon. We’re saying ‘Hi’ to the rest of our squad who’s come down for a live show that the owner of the bar let us put on. Praise and worship among the bars, a-go-go’s, and ping pong shows? Heck yes! That’s what I call a Saturday night in Patong! We go from Soi Sea Dragon to my favorite bar, which is on the next street. It’s not my favorite bar because of the music they play, or because of the nice stools at the tiled bar, it’s my favorite bar because of a girl that works there. We play a couple rounds of Jenga and then head with her to the bar where our squad is playing so she can hear their lovely melodies and meet a few of our squad mates. Since her time and company is worth money I ask her when she wants to go back.
She looks at me and says, “I don’t want to go back… but I have to.”
Now for most people back home, working on a Saturday night isn’t ideal. You would probably also say you don’t want to go back to work. But when your work entails you standing at a bar with your body on display, with your body for sale, saying that you don’t want to go back to work but you have to takes on a whole new weight and meaning.
As I try to not let my face show the emotions I’m feeling we walked her back to her bar, gave her hugs, blew kisses, and promised to see her Tuesday. With a heavy heart we went back to the other bar and mingled with our squad. I’d been wondering since our second night with her how much it would cost to get her out for a night, and this seemed like the perfect night to see if it could happen. I went back to her bar, sat down with her, and flat out asked her how much she needed to make in a night to go home, how much it would cost for me to buy her for the night. She looked at me blankly, so I asked her again. She told me how much. The price was right, so I went up to the bar, pulled out my wallet, slapped the money down, and waved goodbye to the bar manager.
I had just bought a girl for the night.
This is how I spend my personal money on a missions trip: buying a prostitute. But honestly, when it comes down to it, I can’t even think of her as a prostitute any more. In the span of 15 days she’s become so much more to me than that. She’s become a beautiful woman trapped between the lies of the enemy and the falsehoods of this world, a woman with value, cleverness, gifts, and a heart hungry for pure intimacy. She’s become my friend, she’s become someone I love desperately. And when I think of her, of who she is and what she has to offer, that label of ‘prostitute’ seems absolutely meaningless, absolutely misleading, and absolutely gut-wrenchingly misplaced.
Anyways…
We waltz down the street, arm in arm, discussing what we should do. We stop outside a sports bar and she suggests we go play pool. I warn her that I am enormously terrible at pool, I like playing it, but it will probably be embarrassing. She laughs a carefree laugh, gives me a little hug and says, “Oh me too!” We settle in, I pay for a few games of pool and a drink for her, and the game is on! Praise God, she really is as bad at pool as I am! Phew!
About half way through that first game, while she was deciding which shot to take, I took a good look around the bar we were in and a couple realizations hit me: One was that this was my first date in over a year… and it was with a girl. The other was that I was the only woman in that bar not for sale. Take a minute and let the reality of that sink in.
Every single man in there was with at least one Thai woman. A few of them looked up at me, some of them with quizzical looks on their faces, some of them looking away as quickly as possible so as not to make eye contact with me. At any other time in my life I would have probably run from that place. Four months ago I would have looked around that bar and seen the evil in it surrounding me. But instead I looked around me, recognized the brokenness in that room, and praised God for the opportunity to change the atmosphere there.
As I lined up my next shot I looked at the table next to us and one of the men there looked right at me as his hands ran up and down the body of the Thai woman he was with. Somehow between wanting to throw my pool cue at him and ream him out for how he utterly disgusted me, my face turned into a smile and I felt my head nod in a greeting. God has been choosing to take the most unexpected moments to soften my heart towards the men in these bars, and He took that moment to speak to me, to tell me that my smile and laughter could do more for that man than a good lecture would. That His joy would be my strength in that bar.
I took my shot (missing horribly, in case you were wondering), and stood watching my friend. Nothing, not even the men all around me, not even the gruff bar manager who cussed like a sailor, could get in the way of the joy that I was feeling. I felt giddy, I felt like crying and laughing in delight at the same time. That night, she could have been any one of the other women in that bar, but instead the sweet girl that I’ve come to love deeply got to be a normal girl for a few hours. We were just two chicks shooting pool on a Saturday night.
That night the neon signs dimmed, the music quieted, and the crowds thinned.
That night Bangla road lost some of it’s despair and traded it for pure joy.
That night the love of God expanded and the darkness around us trembled.
That night God let me show one girl that she has more to offer than what is demanded of her on those streets.
That night, my first night with a prostitute, was really a night with a loved friend.
That night I paid for her freedom instead of her body.
