You’re walking down a wide strip. There are bars lining both sides of the road. The sun has set and everything around you seems to be waking up. During the day it looks like any other road. Families are eating out at the bars and wandering around, maybe heading to the beach. But as night sets, there is a shift. Spiritual darkness, not only physical darkness, sets over this place.
As you walk down the strip, men and women shove posters in your face with nearly naked women on them saying, “Ping Pong Show.” You shake your head quickly, say “No, no, no thank you,” and rush away. Everywhere you look you see women in small uniforms or even their underwear dancing or trying to pull you into the bars. You look up and see what looks like a large display that you would usually find manikins modeling the latest fashions, but instead of manikins, you find women in barely any clothes dancing on poles.
You move on, trying to pray in your head for God to light the way to where He needs you. But the spiritual chaos causes your prayer to be distracted as you are assaulted with the sights and sounds. You find the first bar. It looks open and less intimidating than the rest, so you and your teammates head in. A woman stops you at the entrance and seats you at a booth towards the front of the bar. The entire time you are there, she does not go more than five feet from you. Later you realize that the bar was one that a local ministry often does ministry in, and the woman was probably very suspicious of five white girls ordering nothing but coke and water. You sit there and watch the different girls. Two are entertaining a couple of men across the way. One girl sits at a table across from you. Sadness and discontent is the only thing you could see on her face. You would have reached out to her if her manager wasn’t sitting at the same table. Eventually, you and your team just decide to pray over the bar, pray over the girls, pray over Petang. Then you head out.
You’re feeling a little more confident. The experience wasn’t nearly as frightening as you thought it would be. Although it was uncomfortable, you never had the feeling that you were in any physical danger. As you walked down the strip, looking for your next spot, you are shocked by a line-up of girls in the middle of the street. Going into this, you knew you were in the midst of sex trafficking activities, but you didn’t know how it was going to look. You didn’t expect to see eight girls with white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes standing in ragged hand-me-down prom dresses holding cardboard signs that said, “European”. You knew that victims of sex trafficking are depressed, oppressed, and hopeless, but to see the looks on their faces; the numbness of their expressions; the deadness in their eyes. You stare at them but continue to walk. You can’t talk. Your heart seems to stop beating. But you don’t stop to talk to them. You keep moving, and so does your team. Suddenly you want to cry. Later on in the week you will think back to that moment. You will ask yourself why you didn’t stop to talk to them, then you will realize God probably kept you from that opportunity because there is great risk from the Russian Mafia, who trafficks these girls. So you move on.
A man stops your group in the street and urges you all to go up some stairs to a bar. He is very enthusiastic and insists and, suddenly, you feel like you have to go. So you go, fully intending to look around then leave, but as soon as you get up there, you find that noone else is there. No customers, at least. The manager welcomes us and so do the girls. We are able to talk to them one-on-one and learn their stories. The girls are very sweet and you can tell they don’t normally get to engage in conversations like your group is having with them. About an hour in, you all go to the bathroom and the girls are really saddened to see you go, despite reassurances that you would come back. On the way to the bathroom you pass by dozens of ladyboys trying to pull you into their respective bars. Once you get to the bathroom, you just wait outside for the others. Not too far away is a Buddhist shrine and you see a ladyboy approach it, leave an offering, and anoint himself with some invisible spirit. You pray over him the entire time. Your group then goes back up to the bar and the girls are absolutely ecstatic to see that you’ve come back. You spend the next two hours praying silently over the girls and talking to them when you can. Before you leave, your team leader leans into one of the girls and says, “I just want you to know that Jesus loves you SO much.” You watch as the girl becomes confused and replies, “I don’t know who that is.” Your heart breaks and you have a paradigm shift. This was the first time in your life that you met someone who confessed they didn’t know who Jesus was. Your leader responds with enthusiasm and gentleness, “Jesus is God and He loves you VERY much.” The girl looked surprised and slightly befuddled, like she couldn’t believe someone could love her. As you all try to leave, the girls beg you to come back the next night to talk to them, and your heart hurts as you tell them you can’t. Then you leave.
The next bar was right down the strip. You all walk until two women grab two of the girls on your team, trying to pull them into each of their bars. You all end up going to the one on your left. There you meet a house mother — a woman in charge of the girls who works in a brothel. She seats you at a table perpendicular to another where two middle-aged men sat with the girls they’d purchased. The house mother points to one of the girls sitting on one of the man’s laps and proudly exclaimed that she was her niece. You feel flabbergasted and confused. How could someone allow their niece to be in such an industry? You struggle to focus on extending grace to the house mother and the men. You spend some time talking to the girls and you meet a girl. She is seventeen years old and she tells you about her five year old and her two year old. You do the math in your head and your heart breaks as you realize that she had to be eleven years old or less when she was trafficked. You listen as she talks about money, like it would save her. You only stay there for an hour or two, playing Connect Four and Jenga with the girls, before you have to go. It’s one in the morning and you are physically tired, but spiritually and emotionally exhausted.
—
This was my experience in the red light district of Penang, Thailand. It’s been a couple of weeks and I am still processing the events that took place. My heart is broken for these girls. I always knew about sex trafficking and the statistics, but going to the district myself and meeting the girls, learning their names, seeing their faces, hearing their stories, made this disgusting practice real to me. I believe that every professing Christian, or even Humanitarian, needs to have this experience, because it is unacceptable that we recognize it as a problem, but continue to do nothing about it.
