Stateside musings from a Typhoon survivor

Wow.  The past month has flown by.  In mid-July I traveled to Hong Kong for a few days to join a team of young women from the U.K. to set up a 24/7 prayer room at a conference called the Gateway Camp.  The event is designed as a time for Christians from all over the world to come for intense prayer and worship together.  It’s also a time to search out what God’s vision is for spreading His kingdom all over the world– especially in China– and how each of us are called to be a part.

 

 The trip was crazy right from the get-go.  Just a few hours before my flight left, I discovered that I needed to apply for a re-entry visa before leaving the country; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to come back! I immediately rushed out of the NightLight office where I was working and rushed over to a Kodak store to get whirlwind passport photos taken (they look like mug shots because the stress had me looking pretty morose).  Ten minutes later, I rushed out to the street to hail a cab and discovered a huge traffic jam stretching as far as I could see.  I remembered back to my last motorcycle taxi ride and how I’d resolved not to risk life and limb on one of those things again.  But I knew that I sat in a car would never make it to Immigration in time to make my flight, so I decided to play Russian Roulette with the rag-tag bunch of motorcycle taxi drivers on the next street and just pray that I got a driver who was well-slept and off drugs.  Turned out to be a good decision, because we were weaving in and around gridlocked cars the entire way and I would have just been part of that parking lot otherwise.  When he dropped me off at the imposingly large three-story Immigration building, I knew I was probably in for the bureaucratic run-around.  Sure enough, the Information desk handed me a form to fill out and sent me upstairs to an office on the third floor, which sent me back down to one of the counters on the first floor, which sent me back to the end of the line at the Information desk.  When I reached the front of the line again, a competent employee finally handed me a necessary number card and sent me back to that counter on the first floor.  I waited tensely for my number to come up and handed my paperwork and passport through the window, realizing at this point that there was another line where I had to wait for my passport and finished visa to come back.  No leaving the country without a passport, so I was thankful that the line went quickly there.  Passport and newly minted visa in hand, I back outside to grab another motorcycle taxi and head back to the office to photocopy my passport.  This driver actually scared me– my eyes were watering sideways we were going so fast.  But I made it back safe and sound, stressed out my Thai coworkers by staying for lunch (they were convinced I would miss the flight), and made it to the airport right on schedule.

 

  I had envisioned that God would use the week to clarify my own life direction and that I could network with specific people or groups in China that I might work with after graduation.  God did neither of the above, but my disappointment couldn’t last long because of the amazing things that He chose to surprise me with.  

 

 On the flight from Bangkok to HK, I sat next to a young Chinese guy from Inner Mongolia named Zikai.  I don’t remember how it started, but we chatted through the whole flight and eventually the conversation turned to what I’ve been doing in Bangkok for the past few months.  As I described my work at NightLight, and the way that I love seeing Jesus in the eyes of people that society rejects, and how I enjoy hanging around prostitutes and sex tourists because those are the kinds of friends Jesus had when he was walking around in human form. He just looked at me in bewilderment.  “You are the strangest person I have ever met!” he laughed.  It was so great to see someone intrigued and completely taken off-guard by the unique nature of Jesus and His message.  

 

 During the week, I had the afternoons free to go out into the city and explore.  One day I opted to take a forty-five minute ferry out to one of the outlying islands, a tiny fishing village called Peng Chau.  I had been told that we had a typhoon coming in the next day.  I’ve been through a few hurricanes, but I really knew nothing about typhoons, other than that I could expect some intense wind and rain and that today would probably be my last chance to see any of the islands.  It was overcast as I set out, but the deep teal of the harbor and the vistas of skyscrapers set against green mountains were beautiful and I pushed the apprehension out of my mind.  About fifteen minutes after we landed, however, the rain began to pour.  Now I was nervous, and there wouldn’t be another ferry for the next hour.  Peng Chau is small enough that you can walk the whole circuit of the island on foot, and I was getting a lot of funny looks out wandering the streets without an umbrella.  Soaking wet, I ducked inside of a little shop where the English-speaking proprietor asked, “What are you doing out here in the typhoon weather?  Don’t you know that the typhoon is very close to Hong Kong already?? They’ve moved the typhoon warning up to a 3.”  He assured me that it wasn’t dangerous until they upgraded the warning to level 8, but the next ferry out could well be the last possible way I had off the island.  “You stole first base, don’t try to steal second!”  He joked.  Now I was fighting some anxiety.  I assured him I had no intention of “stealing second base”– I would be on that next ferry for sure.  When the rain let up a bit, I wandered back outside and decided to at least see the beach while i was there.  When found it, the wind had picked up a lot and I could see that the water was getting choppy. 

 

Heading back towards the pier, I was surprised to see a Western-looking kid standing out in the middle of the road with an umbrella.  He introduced himself in perfect English, and when his mom came around the corner I learned that they lived on the island because she teaches some kind of energy healing.  She had one of her students with her, an older Chinese man from Kowloon who was heading back on the next ferry as well.  She asked him to show me the way back to the pier and let me share his umbrella on the way, as it was raining again.  I got a strange vibe from the guy, Freddy.  He was socially awkward and had bad breath.  A couple feeble attempts at communication showed that his English was virtually zero, and his native tongue was Cantonese rather than Mandarin, so we had no bridge language.  It was an awkward walk to the pier and I was happy to go my separate way once we got there.  But as the ferry was about to leave, this guy found me again.  He came over excitedly and paid for my fare, then he sat down next to me and I realized this guy would be next to me for the next hour. 

 

I had already decided against starting conversation.  But God had other plans.  The man started small talk with his few English words.  He roughly communicated that he comes to Peng Chau to learn energy healing and asked me if I would like to learn, too.  My God heals me already, I told him, so there’s no need.  “Oh, you’re a Christian?”  He asked me.  His grasp of English seemed to be expanding.  “Me too! I’m Catholic.”  Why are you learning energy healing then? I wanted to know.  He went on to explain that he went to church every sunday and sang in the choir, but it wasn’t doing anything for him.  He didn’t feel anything; it wasn’t helping him with anything.  So he had come to a point of wanting to try other things like energy healing, and after that maybe meditation, in order to find inner peace.  I told him he should be careful about those things because if the power or the peace didn’t come from God then they had to be coming from elsewhere and probably from powers that don’t have his best interests at heart.  I told him that God doesn’t bother with keeping church attendance records because He’s concerned with our heart and our motivation more than anything else.  I described the relationship that I have with God and the way that good actions naturally flow out of that because when you’re in love with somebody you want to make them happy.  I’m in love with God; I’m not earning points with Him by doing good things.  Freddy looked at me in genuine wonderment.  “That’s beautiful,” he said.  “I don’t know how to have a relationship like that.”  To him, Freddy explained, God is like a faraway light that I can switch on and off.  Like the sun or the moon.  He don’t feel anything from Him.  “You’re very lucky,” he told me, “because God chose you.”  I was amazed that I was being given such a direct opportunity to speak hope into his life.  “I’m not lucky.  God chooses you too, Freddy.  He wants you to have a relationship like that, too.”  We talked throughout the entire ferry ride back, and he was eager to pray together for God to show Himself and teach him how to have the beautiful day-to-day interaction with the Father that he is so hungry for.  God is unpredictable like that, bringing friendship and making us His mouthpiece at just the moment where we feel tired or too harassed by our own fears and concerns to reach out to anybody else.  Humorously, as soon as our spiritual conversation ended and we went back to talking about our families and trivial things, his English dwindled back down to nothing.  I just laughed and marveled at what had happened.  We beat the typhoon back to Hong Kong too, by the way, and I got to sleep through the brunt of it that night

 

 At the start of my trip, I was a little frightened by the fact that I didn’t feel as excited or certain about my future in China as I had expected to be, and I was surprised by how much time I spent praying and thinking about my family, women that I know in Bangkok, and people I met in Cambodia, rather than about China.  I slowly realized that I had nothing to fear.  I don’t think God has taken away my passion for China.  What He has done is expanded my heart so that the fascination that I’ve had with one particular culture/place/people/food since the time I was a little girl has grown into a love for people everywhere, and a deepening love for God Himself, apart from His work entirely.  And that is really exciting to me!  While in Hong Kong, I actually felt a release from God to go to places outside of China, and for the first time in my life I feel that I can be genuinely happy living in several different places.  

 

 Besides Hong Kong, I also flew up to Chiang Mai (in the North of Thailand) for a weekend to visit Andy, reconnect with our friend Athid from the Karen village where we lived last spring, and see my Thai host family again.  It was so great to go out to dinner with my Thai mom and sister and to sleep in my old room again.  My expanding Thai and my sister’s expanding English gave all of us the chance to have fluent conversation that would have been impossible before.  It’s so strange and lovely for Andy and I both that our Thai families truly regard us as their children.  It would never happen this way in America, but when I came into town my family adjusted their plans and acted like a long lost relative was coming into town.  And when our families take us out in public, they introduce us to all the other Thais as their children– with no further explanation– and no one even bats an eye.  Our features are too dramatically incongruent with the rest of the family to be accounted for by a mutation in the gene pool– but no one thinks to ask!  It’s beautiful, I love it: extreme acceptance and extreme hospitality. 

 

 Being in that familiar setting again brought back a flood of memories, and I could so clearly recognize all of the change and growth that’s happened in my life over the past year and a half since I last left Chiang Mai.  That night, I climbed out onto the roof where, just last Spring, I had sat bewildered by life, feeling uncertain about the future and bitter about the way that God seemed to be pulling apart the life that I thought I wanted.  Now, every one of those concerns has been resolved.  I’m excited about the future and I have tested and seen that God really is good; He is working everything out for my good– even the things that I fight against and would never have chosen for myself.  

 

 In between the travel, there’s been a lot of life happening in Bangkok.  Outreach has continued to disturb me, challenge me, infuriate me, and bring me so much joy.  I love to sit and talk with Jesus in the bars, despite the fact that I find him there in “His most distressing disguise”, as Mother Teresa would say.  Sometimes men and women there who bear the fingerprint of God are so lonely and I see so much suffering in them that I nearly break down crying.  Two weeks ago, I was speaking with a young woman from Isaarn who had white strings tied around her wrist.  I recognized them as part of a common ritual done at the temple and asked her why she had gotten them.  She told me she did the ritual because she wanted protection.  “From spirits?”  I asked.  Yes.  “Do you see spirits?”  I asked.  Yes, she said.  She described to me the terrifying demonic visitations that she had been having at night.  I told her about the power that Jesus has over evil spirits, and about the way that rituals for protection end up backfiring by actually giving those spirits power in one’s life.  We prayed for God to protect her and to show himself to her.  Some time afterward, I talked with her in that bar again.  She looked older, with bags under her eyes covered over with makeup.  The white strings were still on her wrist, and she was now wearing a new Buddhist amulet as well, also presumably for protection.  She told me she was exhausted.  Life in the bars is taking its toll on her, and so is the spiritual slavery that still traps her.  God’s heart is burning for her.  It can be disheartening to see the continuing downward spiral in her life, but I also feel the powerful impact of those moments we have together smiling and talking and praying, and I know that someone needs to be hugging her and imparting life to her, even while she’s still stuck in that dark place… especially while she’s there.  

 

 Just last week, I had another memorable experience getting to be that someone.  I was in another of the bars and I was struck by some girls standing off to the side, waiting to go onstage.  They were completely naked and were about to expose themselves in a glaring spotlight.  But even so, they were standing there in the shadows with arms folded across to cover themselves: trying to maintain some semblance of modesty, of dignity.  Anyone there who actually watched them would realize that they were embarrassed.  Anyone who truly watched their faces onstage would realize that they were withering inside.  Anyone who really looked could see how messed up this was.  But these girls faced a flippant crowd of observers compensating for their own insecurities with a rowdy, false arrogance or with stoic faces.  And yet in this setting of abuse twisted into entertainment, I was able to share a coke with Jesus in the form of a woman from the North of Thailand called Tina.  She shared about the unfaithful husband who broke her heart and the desperate financial situation following their breakup that led her to work in the bars.  She told me she didn’t like the work but she needed the money, so what else was there to do?  We talked about the way that God’s heart is broken, too– for her– and that He has a good plan for her life.  I told her how beautiful she is to God, and that I wasn’t sure how He wanted to make the way out for her but that He knows already.  A light came on in her eyes.  We prayed together, and sat talking about our families for awhile.  When I stood up to leave, she hugged me and said again and again how sincerely happy she was to have met me.  Who she really was feeling the effects of encountering, of course, was Jesus.  I could see the realization of His love lighting up her eyes, and I know that He will continue to show that love more and more fully to Tina. 

 

 God is bringing about incredible change in Bangkok.  We were recently able to help rescue another woman out of a trafficking situation (that’s fourteen people to date!).  And my last day at NightLight, we had huge breakthroughs.  That morning, a group of us spent two hours praying for a woman who was being tortured by an evil spirit inside of her.  Some of us were praying, some of us were singing, some of us were reading scripture, some were dancing.  Everyone was working together and doing whatever God gave them to do, and there really was a crazy fight before this thing left, but it did leave, and we all witnessed the dramatic release that this woman felt afterward.  She had immediate release from physical pain, and a deeper emotional and spiritual release as well.  She went around hugging us with tears of joy her eyes.  Within a few hours of that, we learned that for the first time ever in Bangkok, the Thai police had succeeded in arresting an Uzbek trafficker!  If this Mamasan is prosecuted, I’m sure it will send shock waves through Bangkok’s criminal underworld, and hopefully many more women will be saved from even being trafficked in the first place.  Those kinds of arrests and prosecutions are so hard to nail down, especially with what seems to be a very corrupt Uzbek consulate routinely stepping in to interfere.  So as I leave this City of Angels for its sister city on the West coast, I am overjoyed at what God is doing and pumped to see more and more of it.

 

I just arrived back in the U.S. a few hours ago, and it feels good to be with my family, but I must admit I find the place a little strange.  My first impression upon landing here was how much bigger and louder all of the people were, and my first meal– a grand slam at Denny’s– is a far cry from the curry-and-rice dishes I’ve been having over the past few months.  But none of those minor differences really change what God is doing here, whether “here” is on one side of the world or the other.  I’m eager to continue participating in God’s mission to put on skin and walk around amongst us; I see such a direct connection between everything that I’ve done in Bangkok and everything that there is for me to do back in the U.S.  I know that many of you have felt a fire in your bones, too, as you read about the injustice and the pain and the power and the potential and the beauty that God makes out of ashes and ugly things.  I think He wants us all to be partners in bringing His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and it’s our responsibility to figure out what our role is in that.  I’m ridiculously excited right now just thinking about that way that God is planning to bring miraculous rescues and justice in Houston and Atlanta and Los Angeles and Minneapolis and everywhere else that oppression needs to be exposed in the light.  Let’s expose it!  Find somewhere to plug in and some way to fight.  Fight against the Powers and Principalities through prayer, give money, give time. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  Nightlight U.S.A. and Project Exodus are based in L.A., NightLight Atlanta is just now starting up, Redeemed is new in Houston, Firehouse is operating out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota… I’m sure there are tons more. I firmly believe that a big piece of why I was sent to Thailand was so that I can help connect what’s going on there to the people in my own country who are ready to be mobilized against it.  So I want to share stories and brainstorm strategies; I want to pray together and network and learn from you.  Let’s make this happen, some way or another.

Cambodia under my skin

I spent the past week traveling in Cambodia with my boyfriend, Andy.  We hadn’t seen each other in two months and it was so nice to be together again… somehow, there was so much to talk about and so much life to catch up on even though we had been talking on the phone almost every day.  He’s my best friend– someone that I can be with constantly for days and never get tired of.  It’s comfortable for us to joke and laugh, or to discuss the deeper side of life, or to just be silent and rest in each other’s presence.  And he’s very adventurous and capable, with extremely low standards of what’s bearable or edible, making him the perfect travel companion in the third world.

 

We made no plans before going except to buy $5 bus tickets from Bangkok to the border the day before we left.  At the border, we had our first experience with corruption and bribes in Cambodian government.   After we successfully escaped the eager-faced men trying to herd us into their travel agency and convince us to pay double for our visa, we made it to the “official” visa window and realized we had forgotten to bring passport photos for our visa.  For a small fee that we haggled out with the border officials, we were able to enter the country anyway.  As soon as we crossed into Cambodia from Thailand, things looked different.  It was insanely hot outside, for one thing, and most people had much darker skin and were wearing scarves or what looked like modified beekeeper hats to keep the sun off of their faces and the dust out of their mouths.  We were immediately accosted by a crowd of taxi drivers rushing toward us and– again– trying to swindle us into tourist-level rates to get to Phnom Penh.  They get treated like trash by most of the foreigners who come through, because their trade is pretty obnoxious.  But I think it’s all in the way you approach them.  They’re so desperate to squeeze money out of you because they’re incredibly poor and have to compete pretty aggressively to get work.  If you’re friendly and respectful with them, they turn out not to be very pushy at all and we were even able to befriend some of them  and they would help us negotiate fair prices with others.  Fortunately, Andy had been here before and knew it was much cheaper to go further in to Si Siphon or some other town and find a way into the capital from there, so we took a free shuttle into the small town square and found a pick-up truck full of Cambodians headed for Battam Bong.  We speak virtually no Khmer at all, and the people in the truck had a comparable grasp of English, but a taxi driver we had been talking with on the shuttle helped us to get a good price.  

 

We piled into the truck bed with several other farmers at first, but the police quickly pulled the truck over and refused to let the driver go any further with us sitting out back.  The only thing I can figure is that they don’t want anything to happen to tourists in their country, and they unfortunately value our lives more than those of their own people.  We were reluctant to leave the breeze in the back, but the cab was just as exciting.  It was an old Nissan, and really small, but we and our backpacks were sandwiched between a farm woman on one side and a grandmotherly Buddhist nun on the other.  For the first twenty minutes we were in the car, the other four passengers kept asking us questions in Khmer and laughing hysterically at our confused faces and irrelevant English responses.  The grandmother sitting next to (on top of) me had a mole on her wrist that looked like a sixth finger.  At first, she suspiciously pulled on Andy’s blonde leg hair, but it didn’t take her long to rest her arm across my lap and offer us rambutans and a strange, scaly fruit neither of us had ever seen before.  

 

When we reached Battam Bong, we were dropped off in the town center and began to look for our next ride.  The town was a shambles.  Trash everywhere, run down buildings, hot and dusty.  The usual crowd of taxi drivers literally sprinted towards us yelling, but we were eventually able to find another truck instead.  This was another beat-up Nissan, and it already had furniture tied down to the top of the cab and a completely full bed of vegetables and who knows what else under tarps.  We settled on the price of $5 passage for both of us to the capital, and were told that we’d be leaving in the next hour.   That done, we left our bags on the back of the truck, had lunch at a sidewalk stall nearby, and headed out into the city to look around.  We were both sweating even more profusely than I do in Bangkok, and I was starting to feel the beginning of a light-headed dizziness when the sky darkened suddenly.  The temperature dropped within minutes and a cool breeze came up while we searched around for the market and wondered where anyone in this place got their food from.  In the middle of a roundabout we saw a huge painted statue of an eight-armed Hindu god looking ominous and imposing as it loomed over the traffic, facing into the gathering storm.  We made it back to the covered sidewalk next to the truck just as it began pouring rain.  Thankfully, our driver had covered our bags with a tarp.  It hadn’t stopped raining by our planned departure time, and when it did stop we were told there’d be another hour delay because we were waiting on someone to bring money to buy gasoline.  We watched the men stand around on the sidewalk yelling and joking and playing together like little kids for awhile, wondering when or if we’d be leaving, and then we headed off again and finally found the market.  Again, the place looked trashed– there was a good deal of buying and selling going on, with two floors of clothes and meat and two dirt roads of food on both sides, but there were piles of rotting fruit, vegetables, and other refuse lying around in the dirt everywhere, and it was very dark inside the building.  We bought some fruit for the road and headed back over to the truck, only to find that there was still no sign of leaving.  We sat down again.  It rained more.  We finished our fruit.  Then there was a flurry of activity as the men loaded more hay and vegetables onto the truck and five other Cambodians climbed aboard.  We climbed up with them and made ourselves comfortable sitting amongst the bags and people.  Money was collected from everyone and our departure seemed imminent, but just then two of the men pulled up across the street with rice wine and all the hooligans we’d been hanging out with on the sidewalk (as well as our driver)  piled into that truck bed to smoke and drink together.  A vendor came by and sold us seasoned crickets from a basket on top of her head, and all of us passengers sat around eating bugs and waiting for the boys to finish up their fun.  I shared around some dark chocolate, but after the delicious crickets no one seemed very excited about that.  The men eventually headed back over to the truck and I was relieved to find that we were switching drivers, because the original guy probably weighed all of fifty pounds and had really liked the rice wine.

 

Finally, three-and-a-half hours after arriving, we set out on the six-hour truck ride.  I was excited.  The weather had cooled off and felt great, we were crowded in with the locals, I felt free being outside unrestrained, and the scenery was beautiful.  There were seven of us sitting on the back, and I kept having to reposition myself every few minutes because it wasn’t a very comfortable set-up, but at least no one had any qualms about personal space.  When it got dark outside, we all tried to spread out and sleep and everyone had legs and arms wedged against them but no one cared.  At one point when the truck stopped on the side of the road and everyone piled out for a bathroom break, I was surprised to see everyone squat down within a few feet of one another.  It’s not like anyone was exposed, but there’s just no expectation of privacy or    space for people there.  Eventually, everyone had been dropped off besides Andy and I, so we were invited into the cab up front just before it started raining again and I drifted off to sleep until we arrived in the city around 1 am.  It had taken us about eighteen hours to get from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, but it only cost us around $10 apiece, and we got to travel in authentic Cambodian style.  

 

Bleary-eyed, we were dropped off in some nondescript street and hired a motorcycle taxi to take us to a guesthouse where Andy had stayed before.  The place is called Lakeside, but it could just as accurately be called Swampside.  Based on the mysterious rippling and bubbling I saw right outside my door, I’m pretty sure there are swamp monsters living in the muddy arm of the lake that wraps around the roughhewn wooden boardwalk of rooms.  The place wasn’t too clean, but for $4 a night there’s not much ground for complaint.  I was so exhausted that I fell asleep immediately.  Next morning we grabbed more street food for breakfast and borrowed a Cambodian cell phone to call our Cambodian friend, who had expected to meet us the night before.  Within a few seconds of hopping onto another moto taxi to head over to his temple, our driver threw on his screeching brakes.  As we nearly smashed into the back of the car pulling out in front of us I realized that his motorcycle barely HAD brakes.  I tapped him on the shoulder, “Hey man, I think you have problem with your brakes!”  “I know!”  he yelled back over his shoulder.  We just had to laugh.  It was either be amused or be terrified.  Traffic in Phnom Penh makes traffic in Bangkok look sane.  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen– a  streaming mass of criss-crossing motorcycles, cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and the occasional produce wheelbarrow or tractor dragging a two-wheeled platform piled high with people or hardware.  Vehicles play chicken with each other.  People brazenly cruise down the wrong side of the road, amidst oncoming traffic.  And people will carry anything and everything with them on motorcycles– mattresses, sheets of glass, sleeping babies.  The roundabouts are even crazier, and at intersections the few traffic lights that have been installed are a great expression of the Cambodian sense of humor, because no one pays any attention to colored lights in that city.  Another running joke is the fact that foreigners are sporadically held accountable to ethereal traffic laws or even rules that have been made up on the spot to gouge money.  The cops’ pitifully low salary breeds corruption because they have to find their own way to make ends meet.  We would often see them on rural streets collecting “tolls” of their own accord.  And when we rented a motorcycle ourselves, policemen walked out in front of our bike to pull us over at random.  One of them asked to see Andy’s driving license and then pocketed it and threatened to keep the license and the motorbike unless we payed him 40,000 riel ($10).  Andy tried to talk him down, but there were six of them standing there and the guy wasn’t about to budge.  He showed us a thick stack of confiscated licenses from California, Australia, and all over the world to prove that he really would keep it.  He refused to tell us his name or to actually write us a ticket, but he kept yelling “You break Cambodian law Cambodia cop keep license and motorbike!” and growing more and more heated.  We finally paid the bribe and drove off.  I was furious.  It was only $10, but the complete lack of justice made me sick, and I can only imagine how much more serious those infractions of justice must be for impoverished, illiterate locals who don’t even have a foreign embassy on their side.  

 

When we reached our friend’s temple, it reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of India.  Even this respected religious sight was crumbling, faded, and dirty.  We met him inside and sat talking for awhile in one of the rooms where four monks sleep.  Each of them had decorated the wall behind his bed with pictures and photos.  One of the walls was covered with religious images of the Buddha and sketches of Hindu goddesses; another was covered in pictures of Cambodian beauty queens and girls from fashion magazines.  Our friend is a Buddhist monk who we met while teaching English at Wat Suandok in Chiang Mai last spring.  He graduated this spring, so he’s back in Cambodia biding his time until he figures out a way to pay for further study.  When I left last year, I had never expected to see him again, so we were surprised and happy when we emailed him about our trip and he immediately offered to take us to visit his village.  I remembered him as a very intelligent and ambitious man, but now we found him even more serious than before.  He has heavy things on his mind.  He told us that he doesn’t like going outside of His temple and seeing the suffering of the beggars on the streets, and he doesn’t enjoy going back to his village and seeing the difficult lives of his family, and the lack of education and opportunities for the children there.  It is difficult for him to relate to the people there who are ignorant of the outside world and don’t understand why he stubbornly continues his studies instead of returning to the village to marry and become a rice farmer once more, like all of his other friends who originally became monks with him.  He idolizes education, studying the speeches of American leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, and he dreams of becoming a politician in his own country and improving Cambodia with education, fair democracy, and developing infrastructure.  Right now his future feels very uncertain to him because he is unsure of whether he will be able to pay for graduate study and doesn’t know what to do otherwise.  By the time we left Cambodia, he had firmly decided not to continue as a monk, so that he will have freedom to relate to others like normal people and so that he can work.  The three of us had lunch together and then crowded into a van to head out towards his village.  It was crowded enough, but he told us, “We are very lucky today.  Usually four people on this bench, and more sitting facing us so we all have to sit like this.”  He drew his legs up into a crouching position.  Thank God.  We traveled past endless, flat, vibrantly green rice fields dotted with the palm trees that provide fruit, coconuts, roofs, and lumber for the villagers there.  Every time we stopped, vendors would shove their wares in through the window and if you made the mistake of eye contact with them, they would be convinced that you were going to buy and would keep holding out their dumplings or crickets or boiled bird eggs towards you until the van pulled away.  When we arrived in the “district center” for James’ area– a few palm leaf structures along the side of the dirt road selling fruit and gasoline– we exchanged the van for two motorbike taxis and set off on a narrower dirt road toward the village.  We passed people working ankle-deep in the rice fields with wide straw hats and palm tree houses on stilts, one of which was apparently used as a Viet Cong outpost during the Vietnam war.  Our friend says there are still bomb craters around it.  The vast expanse of the blue sky and the green rice fields was like a two-page spread out of National Geographic.  I had been waiting my whole life to come to a place like that.  And the air felt so clean in contrast to Bangkok’s smoggy, exhaust-filled haze.  The motorbikes dropped us off at the local temple, where many villagers were gathered for an ordination ceremony of novice monks the next day.  Everyone crowded around to stare at us as our friend introduced us to two ancient, potbellied men, one of which was the abbot of the temple and his teacher.  Everyone was smiling broadly so we smiled back.  We were all just standing there staring at each other– there would be a lot of that in the next couple of days– but it didn’t feel awkward.  Our friend then asked if we would like to see some local ruins that were older than Angkok Wat, and we followed him back onto the dirt road.  He looked out across the rice fields and paused for a moment.  “I think, maybe there is not a road.”  We then followed him through a half mile of rice fields, crossing rice canals, sinking into the mud, and wading through water above our knees.  We took off our sandals and went barefoot to keep from getting sucked into the mud.  It was fantastic. We were slipping around and laughing the whole time, trying not to destroy the rice shoots between our toes and trying not to fall in and soak everything we had packed for the next three days.  

 

After visiting the small ruins, we waded back and walked the rest of the way to our friend’s house.  There were a lot of little children hanging around there with his parents, and none of the boys were wearing any clothing.  Our friend says that in the older generation, boys never wore clothes until they were about fifteen years old (yikes!), but nowadays they can only go around naked until about age ten.  To me it seems like a hygienic nightmare, not to mention that climbing trees and running around that way strikes me as dangerous, but I guess they make it to adulthood alright.  His mom greeted us as we entered the yard: a short, wizened woman with a broad smile full of teeth stained reddish-brown from chewing beetlenuts.  She was very hospitable, but she had a fierce demeanor.  When she saw Andy she spoke very aggressively and slapped him on the arm several times, but she kept smiling the whole time.  Andy and I looked at each other confused, waiting for translation.  She apparently had said that she was glad we had come and that Andy looked exactly the same as Alex (an American friend of ours who had visited the village last year).  It must be the beards and the light eyes.  She then peered up at me with brows knit together and asked me something in Khmer with the same seemingly aggressive tone that was hard for me to decipher.  “She wants to know, if you plan to come to Cambodia, why you have not study Cambodian language already?”  our friend translated.  I really had no answer.  “I wish I had!” I told her.  

She was clearly in control of the household.  She dictated the times we ate and bathed.  Bathing was an interesting phenomenon in the village because there is no running water or private space, and the villagers bathe without removing all of their clothing, so men and women can bathe standing next to one another.  There’s a technique to it obviously, and that technique is a mystery to me, so it was a bit intimidating the first night when she handed me a bathing sarong and sent me around to the side of the house to wash up with the giant jars of water they keep there and a small bucket.  At least the dark was in my favor.  Humorously, several of the women and little girls in the family kept coming over to check on me and give me suggestions.  But the next day she sent me over there during daylight hours while the whole family was sitting together in the shade under the house about twenty feet away, so needless to say I didn’t get as thoroughly clean that time.  My first toilet experience in the village was also supervised.  As there are actually no toilets in the village, people just have to walk out into one of the rice fields to take care of business, and when I asked the mom where this should happen she responded by walking me out to the place and then standing nearby to wait for me.  Ha.   

 

That evening, our friend took us around from house to house to meet neighbors and relatives, and every time we stopped we drew a crowd of shy but curious onlookers.  Sometimes they would ask questions, but mostly we spent a lot of time laughing and smiling and staring at each other.  There was a tiny seventy-four year old man who was fascinated with Andy’s beard and with the bridge of his nose.  A crowd of children followed us around, and we learned a few Khmer phrases to talk to them a little bit.  We walked out behind the village and tried our hand at helping some of the people in the fields pull up rice shoots to replant, and I got to ride on the back of a water buffalo that was being brought in from the fields for the day.  We also visited a woman in her home who has been sick and unable to walk for several years now.  It was so great to have the opportunity to talk with and pray for her.  I assume she doesn’t know much about Jesus, but she was happy to have us pray to our God for healing and was very grateful afterwards.  She wants very badly to be able to walk, and I hope that God will show Himself to her by doing that.  We’ll see, I guess.  As it started getting dark, we headed back to the house and ate the same food we would have at every meal for the rest of our stay: rice, sticky rice, raw fish with bones, fried salty fish with bones, cucumbers, and clover-like vegetables dipped in thick, fishy soup.  Afterwards, there was thin, salty tea to chase it down.  I’m not a big fan of fish or salt, so I was never excited about eating in the village but I can eat anything to live.  I slept so well that night, for at least eight hours, since there’s no point staying up very late with no electricity.  All of us slept in the same big room.  I woke up a little after sunrise, and everyone had already left the house to go about their daily activities.

 

It’s funny in Asian culture how big things will happen with no lead-up at all.  Before I had even brushed my teeth or grabbed water, our friend asked if we would like to go see the lake.  We thought it would be a quick walk, but it turned out to be another hike through the rice fields and then through the brush, for over three hours, with our friend playing an odd assortment of Justin Timberlake, Irish boy bands, and Thai love songs from his cell phone the whole time.  On the way back, we stopped at several houses to pay visits to friends and relatives before finally returning to the house for lunch.  We then discovered that the only truck of the day had left at 6 am and we would have to wait until the next day.  Our friend told us it would be absolutely impossible to leave any sooner.  We were disappointed because we had planned to make a night of it in the city for my birthday, so we mentally adjusted ourselves to spending another 24 hours in the village and laid down to take a nap as the oppressive heat of the day set in.  It was so stuffy in that house.  We both fell asleep on and off, but after about an hour we woke up completely drenched in sweat and realized that everyone else was sleeping on palm wood platforms under the house because it was so much cooler down there.  A few minutes after we had joined the others under the house, our friend came into the yard and started packing up his things.  “Some motorcycles are coming in a few minutes.  You should gather your things.”  The motorbikes pulled up almost immediately and, just like that, in five minutes’ time we had said our goodbyes and left.  His mom had been eying my polka dot umbrella most of the day.  Before we left I offered her some food, but she refused it and said something in Khmer.  Our friend laughed as he translated, “She says she doesn’t want that, the only thing she wants is your umbrella.”  Awesome.  So she sat there silently with folded arms until I offered it to her, and then lavishly thanked me and bowed several times in the Khmer style, as though the gift were completely unexpected.  She was a funny lady.  

 

Back in the city it was pouring rain.  We waited out the rain at another temple with James, then left to find another guesthouse for the night.  For $5, we got a closet-sized room with a tent ceiling, holes in the top half of the only permanent wall, and paper-thin improvised walls on the other sides.  There was no AC, we were next to a noisy lounge, and there was construction going on outside.  We had a good laugh about that and headed out to dinner.  

 

Since it was my twenty-first birthday, we went out for red wine and chocolate souffle.  We were sitting at an open-air cafe in a touristy part of town along the river, but even there the poverty of the city was inescapable.  A little boy soon came over to our table to sell us books and postcards, and I was reluctant to buy anything because I knew that he wouldn’t keep the money and there was no telling whether this money actually went to pay for his schooling or not.  He spoke great English, and had obviously learned a pity-inspiring routine to use with foreigners, but I think we surprised him by asking his name and just chatting with him for several minutes before finally buying some postcards.  Not five minutes after he left us, another little boy came up selling the same things.  Andy asked him if his mother were nearby and whether we could go meet her.  The kid was really confused at first and kept insisted that his mother had no postcards to sell, but he agreed to wait while we finished our drinks and paid the bill and then took us down the street to meet the rest of his family.  A teenage mom with a drugged infant approached us on the way (just like in Bangkok, the beggars will often drug their children so that they can sleep soundly on the street), so we brought her with us and ended up talking and praying with all of them on the darkened sidewalk there.  Then we took a few of them over to another restaurant nearby to share amok (Cambodia’s signature curry).  As we sat there playing jenga and connect four while our food cooked, we drew the curiosity of the restaurant staff, as well as a throng of other street kids.  It really hit us that there were way more people on that one city block than we could possibly reach out to in a night.  As we left, one of the other street boys who had been watching approached us.  We didn’t give him any money, but when I stooped down and hugged him he literally clung to me.  It made me wonder when he had last been hugged by anyone.  It hadn’t ended up being the night out we had planned, but it was a great birthday nonetheless– God’s presence was with us everywhere we went, and it was incredible to see the effect that encountering that Presence had on people. 

 

Throughout our stay in the city, God continued to bring people to us.  There was a man named Sot who peddled a tuk tuk alongside us that night for several minutes trying to get us to buy a ride.  We made small talk with him as we went along, and the next day we ran into him again.  He told us that he had no work for a couple days, and that he was sick and hadn’t eaten because he had no money.  We explained that we already had a motorcycle, but he was welcome to come with us to get something to eat.  We sat down with him at a noodle place and talked to him in simple English about Jesus until the food came.  Then we held hands and prayed with him– for healing, for his family, for God’s provision.  When we finished, his eyes were tearing up.  He hugged us both and told us to write down our names for him because he never wanted to forget who we were.  Such a simple act, and less than ten minutes of our time, but Sot was deeply moved by that expression of the love of Christ that was so dramatic in opposition to his daily reality.   

 

Cambodia is the poorest country I have ever been to.  There are parts of Bangkok that are desperately poor, but those beggars and slums exist alongside world-class shopping malls, hotels, and cinemas.  In Phnom Penh, there is nowhere to get away from the poverty.  Even the most respected temples and the touristy areas are dirty and unkempt.  The entire city looks trashed, as though it was abandoned and then re-inhabited by squatters who haven’t attempted to rebuild or maintain anything.  It reminds me of a war zone.  As a matter of fact, the city WAS evacuated completely by the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s, and I don’t think it has recovered yet.  The country is still reeling from that brutal regime which sought to completely destroy culture and family life and which succeeded in murdering millions of Cambodia’s most gifted, educated, and intelligent people.  About 45 minutes outside of Phnom Penh by motorbike lies one of the Khmer Rouge killing fields where this genocide was carried out.  There, we walked around an eerily peaceful, shaded field of grassy pits that were once used as mass graves.  In the center of the area is a stupa (a Buddhist monument tower) constructed of human skulls.  We came upon a tree marked as “the magic tree”, once used to suspend a loudspeaker for blaring music to drown out the moaning of victims as they were torturously killed there.  Another was marked as “the killing tree”, which soldiers had thrown children up against until they died.  Nowadays there is a school next to the killing fields, so all the time we were wandering amongst the ghastly pits and trees, we could hear children laughing and playing in the distance.  They sounded like ghosts.  

 

Within the city itself, there is another school that the Khmer Rouge had turned into an execution camp.  Like the incongruent serenity of the killing fields, the school is especially chilling for its perverse transformation of a safe and innocent place into a site of unspeakable horror.  There are iron bars and razor wire primitively installed on the top of the surrounded wall and over windows.  There, we and some other silent visitors drifted in and out of classrooms– with the chalkboard still hanging on the front wall– that had been converted into torture chambers and holding cells.  Some of the rooms were entirely empty save for a metal frame bed, chains used to fasten prisoners onto it, and a black and white photo on the wall of a mutilated human being who had been tortured on that bed.  The Khmer Rouge were proud of what they did, and they carefully photographed each of their victims twice: the first time on coming to the prison, and the second time as they were dying or had just died after torture.  These sites were disturbing to visit, but I wanted to see them because I know that it is impossible to understand contemporary Cambodia apart from understanding the recent violence it suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. 

 

We stopped by our friend’s temple again that afternoon to say goodbye.  He had spent the day sleeping and thinking, oppressed again by the heaviness of his thoughts and the uncertainty of his future.  We had talked with him over the past couple of days about God’s character as a Father and about the hope that He brings, but he had seemed very closed off.  Now we spoke frankly with him about the futility of education and democracy as an end in themselves.  We told him that these things had not eliminated homelessness or suffering in America, and that Cambodia needs God’s power to bring a deeper, spiritual solution if things are ever going to change for the better.  Before we left, we asked if we could pray with him and he surprised us by extending his hand to us.  As a woman, I am never supposed to have physical contact with a monk, so the gesture was dramatic.  We joined hands and prayed for God to give our friend wisdom and to show him the truth.  Afterward he seemed to be thinking again, but he was smiling and more peaceful this time.  We encouraged him to trust that whether or not he is financially able to continue his education, God has a destiny for him and can do incredible things through his life.  He shook both of our hands again before we left.  I am excited to hear how God continues to show himself to  this searching man.  

 

I’ve already written a novella here but I could go on.  There was so much substance to this trip; so many thoughts and impressions.  I was deeply stirred by Cambodia, and I feel confident that I’m not even close to finished there yet. 

“If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep…”

1:30 a.m.  I’m an insomniac tonight, and I have work in the morning.  Perfect time to update the blog.

 

At outreach tonight we went into a bar where I’d never been before.  It was full of dancers and customers, and I started a conversation with a very overweight Australian man that didn’t go very well.  He was very defensive from the very beginning.  First he said that he was only there to drink “but the scenery’s nice”, and “of course” he would rather be served drinks by half naked women than by some fat old bartender at some other place, then in answer to my pointing out that he could drink some other place without exploiting people and consuming them as one-dimensional commodities, he replied that his being there or not doesn’t make a bit of difference since the girls will be there either way, and he told me that his wife was back at the hotel and knew exactly where he was but didn’t mind.  Interesting marriage that must be.  Considering that not too long ago I actually sat near a guy who brought his pregnant wife with him into the go-go bar, I wasn’t shocked.  But I certainly was disgusted on both occasions.  Even now, I can’t shake that disgusted feeling.  I hate what that guy is doing; I hate the role that he is acting out in this whole situation, and I am so frustrated by all of the lies he believes that allow him to participate in it so nonchalantly.  But I am praying for him and I really feel badly that the conversation ended on that note since we were interrupted by one of the drink servers.  I know that man must be as wounded and confused as many of the women up on stage in that bar, and I know that Jesus is pursuing his heart, too.  Thankfully, I know that God is capable of using that short interaction for His purposes in spite of any mistakes I made in the course of that conversation.

 

The past couple of outreaches, women have been really open with me.  We’ve been able to connect instantly, and last week I talked with one woman for about half an hour and spent time praying with her right there in the bar.  I could tell that she isn’t ready to leave the bars yet, but I could also tell that the prayer and the things I was telling her about herself and about the way God sees her were really affecting her.  I’m excited to see that even in such a toxic environment, God is actively calling people out of the darkness into His marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9).  

 

That same night, something remarkable happened.  There was a homeless-looking Thai man outside the bars on the sidewalk across the street, and when we walked over there afterward to talk a little bit before going our separate ways for the night, he was sitting and staring at us with extreme hatred.  There was very clearly an evil spirit possessing him.  When I looked over at him he narrowed his eyes at me and slowly raised his arm to point at me with an outstretched finger.  Quietly under my breath I began to say Jesus’ name over and over again.  As soon as I started to do that, he closed his eyes and began wincing and curling up his fingers and drawing his arm back into himself, muttering something to himself in Thai, the only word of which I caught was “power”.  He didn’t look at me again after that.  But a few minutes later, he suddenly leapt up and lunged towards us with his hand folded into the shape of a gun, pointing it at each of our heads to “shoot” us.  Several of us faced him and instinctively started praying out loud in a language we didn’t understand, and he instantly stopped, lowered his arm again, and backed away in slow motion.  He stood back at a distance after that, unable to come near us, and we turned and left without further incident.  Afterwards I reflected on the fact that the situation had actually been pretty freaky, but I had not actually been afraid.  My heart had pounded, but it was exhilarating to see that God’s power was more than enough to protect us.

 

Aside from outreach, I’ve had a lot of time recently to go out into the city on my own and explore.  Last weekend I dragged myself out of bed early to head across the city and visit some friends who are working with Servant Partners in a slum on the eastern edge of Bangkok.  I say dragged because The day before that, I got a rather harrowing hour-long $2 Thai massage and I felt like every muscle from my tailbone up to my brain stem was going to be one long bruise (that’s just how those things go, and ultimately it’s good for you; today my muscles feel more relaxed than they have for weeks).  But the trip was worth the lost sleep.  I hailed a taxi and over the next forty minutes or so, I had a humorous Thai conversation with my excitable cab driver who yelled almost constantly– out of enthusiasm, not anger.  He told that he’s forty years old and has a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend.  I told him she’s young enough to be his daughter.  “But I don’t have children!” he laughed, “No problem!”  He also told me I should stay in Thailand forever because America is “scary” and expensive.  Ha.

 

When we arrived at my “destination”, an empty street corner in an unlikely neighborhood, he was worried about leaving me there and wanted to drive me closer to wherever my friends were going to meet me, but with effort I convinced him to let me out of the cab before the fare got any higher.  When I got out, I really had no idea where I was either, but I called my friend Lexi and described where I was standing, and after a few minutes they appeared out of a hidden maze of narrow sidewalks and shanty houses.  We wandered back through the neighborhood towards the small house she shares with another girl, Michelle, who is her partner in ministry.  She knew everybody, and they all smiled and greeted us as we passed.  House church was great– we all sat around on the floor together with kids running in and out of the open doors, and it started out with a huge potluck meal, then we sang songs together, listened to a Bible story, passed around plates of lychees and rambutans, and worshipped through singing some more.  Afterwards, Lexi and Michelle sent me off with two, twenty-something Thai girls to help me get home (the cab had been crazy expensive).  They hardly spoke any English but it was a good thing they went with me, because the Thai-style transportation was confusing.  First we got onto a crowded bus together.  We hurried to the back, because my new friends told me that my brown skin would let me ride without paying like the locals do, but if the driver found out I was a foreigner then he’d demand a fare.  We pushed our way back through the standing crowd in the aisle a few stops later and ran to catch a water taxi on a nearby canal.  I loved talking to these girls about their own dreams to tell people about Jesus in other parts of the world.  We had all read “The Heavenly Man”, and we got excited talking about Brother Yun’s incredible life in China and all the suffering he endured and the miracles he experienced.  They got out of the water taxi before I did, and even though I had already been the only foreigner in a boat full of thirty people, I was now completely on my own and wasn’t quite sure how the water taxi system works.  I noticed that at some of the stops, if no one was waiting to get on, the boat wouldn’t even stop.  Every dock has a sign with the name of the current stop and the next one coming up.  There’s a tarp on each side of the boat that the crew raises up to hide passengers from the sun and the nasty water that splashes out of the brownish-grey canal.  At each stop I would pull it down a bit and peer over, watching for my stop.  When I saw mine was up next, I went ahead and climbed over the six people sitting between me and the side of the boat, and watched other passengers to see how exactly we were supposed to disembark.  They started climbing onto the outside of the boat, so I did that, and hung on to the side as we trolled towards the dock.  We sort of knocked into the tires on the edge of the dock, and the boat bounced off of them and continued forward.  I realized we weren’t going to stop, so I just jumped out of the moving boat with a couple other passengers as we pulled alongside the dock.  I followed them into a deserted, unfamiliar street and the last leg of the journey was to find a motorcycle taxi to take me the rest of the way home.  The driver wove in and out of the cars in gridlock traffic and I squeezed my knees in close to the bike to keep from taking out any rearview mirrors.  All in all, it was quite an adventure.   I think I may avoid the motorcycle taxis in the future…

 

We need a revolution.

The other day I was in a taxi on the freeway, and I saw a guy next to us on the road with his food cart and grill attached to the side of his motorcycle, cooking his wares as he went along– nothing hits the spot like road grime sausage.  This wasn’t too long after seeing an excavator on the side of the freeway precariously lifting and dropping chunks of concrete and jagged sprigs of rebar within three feet of passing motorcycle traffic.  Never a dull moment.

 

So this week has been entirely different from any of the others yet.  For one thing, a friend of mine from Pepperdine, Rachel, who was volunteering with Free Burma Rangers in Chiang Mai was flown into Bangkok on Monday to be hospitalized.  Some doctors in Chiang Mai cut open her foot to drain a swollen spider bite, and in the ravine they had gouged out, a raging infection began and quickly started spreading up her ankle.  They had her on a constant IV drip of some serious antibiotics for several days, starting as soon as she got here, and it was a waiting game to see whether or not the medicine was effective so that something else could be tried quickly if the infection continued to advance.  Despite the circumstances, it was good to see her at the hospital; we spent time praying for her healing and talking about our experiences in Thailand.  She was telling me about what Free Burma Rangers does, and I am amazed at the incredible suffering going on in Burma right now, and at the way that God’s people are showing incredible strength and courage to go into the thick of the war zone and risk their lives on behalf of the people there.  After the infection started dying down, she was released early saturday morning to fly home to the States.

 

For another thing, this city is a revolving door– so many people pass through, and it’s been great to meet a lot of people who are on intriguing, meaningful personal journeys and who are catalysts for exciting change in the world.  One such person is a woman I met this past week named Wendy.  She was part of a prayer team that came through NightLight on a tour.  When she passed through the office where I work, she casually asked me about my plans for the future and discovered that we have a common passion for reaching China.  We met for breakfast two days later and had one of the most inspirational hour-and-a-half’s of my summer so far, sharing our stories and our dreams for the future; sharing what God is doing in our hearts, our friends, and our corners of the world and discovering that He’s doing a lot of the same things across the globe in my generation right now.  We talked a lot about the intentional community I belong to at Pepperdine and about other communities like it that are popping up all over the place.  I learned from her about some people and organizations who are helping prostitutes in China, I came home pumped.  Long story short, I may be tagging onto a British team at a conference in Hong Kong next month to help run the 24/7 prayer room and to network/worship with like-minded people in China and HK and from around the world and to figure out more about the next stage of my life.  

 

Regarding this week’s most significant anomaly, I have to be scant with the details, but basically I am adjusting to having no control over my time, to losing my freedom to come and go from my house at will or even to walk down certain streets at all, and to having my schedule dictated by at least five other people’s plans.  And yet, it’s been an important and satisfying few days here recently– the conversations and moments that I’ve been privileged to share with some incredible friends just blow me away.  And God’s impeccable orchestration of events has never been more evident.  He really is liberating and bringing justice here in Bangkok!  

 

Outreach was crazy this last time.  Part of it was that we went into the bars later than usual, after the shows had already started, and it was really shocking… complete nudity and lewd acts brought into the spotlight amidst a darkened chaos of casual onlookers and movement everywhere.  There was just a heaviness over everyone that made it heartbreaking to watch the girls and know the lies that they must be having drilled into their heads every night about their identities and their worth.  With the things they’re put through, I imagine that they can’t psychologically survive without detaching from themselves and their physical realities in some way.  Everything is an act; they’re just playing characters on a stage.  And with spiritual eyes (or just baseline compassion), the mask is painfully easy to see through.  I felt led to pray against suicidal thoughts and hopelessness in their minds.  When one of them came over and we struck up a conversation, I was having such a hard time focusing in on her and our conversation because there were was a metaphorical train wreck going on all around us, accompanied by very loud music, and it was very hard to just block it out.  I think she may have already been using alcohol or something else to cope at that point, but we were still able to have a good talk.  She told me that her parents would kill her if they knew what she was doing.  I told her that she is God’s daughter, too, and that He doesn’t like her situation either because He loves her so much.  It makes him sad to see her there because men should give her respect, and her job can be dangerous.  

 

As we were sitting there, one of my team members recognized a man sitting in the bar as an administrator she knew at an international school in Bangkok!  She went over to talk to him, and she told him how shocked she was to see him there. “Why?” he asked.  “Because I thought you respected women,” she replied.  “I do!” he said, claiming that it “wasn’t what she thought”, that he was just there for some “downtime” after work to relax with friends and have a beer.  I’m sure that the naked women dancing there influenced his choice of locale for unwinding after work (how could they not?), but he is probably still living under the myth that he isn’t degrading the women or causing them any harm unless he sleeps with them.  Most men in the bars probably have some justification for why they’re different from “those other guys” or for why their presence there isn’t “what you would think”.  Surprisingly, he ended up sharing with her that he knows the women in the bar hate what they’re doing and that he would love to stop some of them from coming to the bars in the first place by going to Isaan (the impoverished region where most of the women come from) and creating jobs there.  He had a very defeatist attitude about whether such a venture would be viable in Isaan, however, once women and their families have already grown accustomed to the dramatically higher wages that prostitution brings.  He was equally jaded about the possibility of either cutting demand by changing the hearts and minds of sex tourists or of cutting supply by rescuing some of the women.  He doesn’t know Jesus, so I can’t blame him for his rational doubts about the feasibility of eradicating prostitution in Thailand.  But I happen to know Jesus quite well, and I know that kind of huge miracle is exactly the sort of thing that He delights in doing.  All things are possible with God.

 

Hearing this man’s perspective reminds me again that prostitution in Thailand is a spiritual problem and has to be pulled out by its spiritual roots– outside of the knowledge of God, these men and women will never be able to see the broad implications of their actions or understand how their warped sexualities and identities feed into one another’s brokenness.  Collectively, there has to be a revolution in our brains and in our culture[s] to break us out of the layers and layers of lies and misconceptions that allow this exploitation to continue.  Only God can do that, and apart from His active involvement (I am confident that He IS deeply involved), all of our human effort comes to nothing.

 

 

God’s heart is breaking inside of me.

I’ve been tired a lot since getting here, and I’ve attributed it mostly to the heat up to now, but yesterday it was so bad– I slept eight hours, just like I have been lots of nights here, and I was still so agonizingly sleepy all day at work.  On top of that, I felt like I wasn’t breathing very deeply and my mind was fuzzy– I couldn’t even focus very well in conversation.  I talked to some of the other volunteers about it and they said it was probably the horrible air quality here and the lack of iron in my diet (iron controls the levels of oxygen that my blood can carry).  I prayed against it and I had Andy praying at home, and today was %100 better– I’ve had a long day but I was very energetic through out.  So thank God!  Please keep praying for me about that and in the meantime I’ll try to eat more dark vegetables and red meat.

Tonight was by far my hardest one in Bangkok yet.  I cannot begin to imagine the pain that God endures watching his beloved creation suffer so much, because mercifully, I can only see and feel and comprehend fragments of the entire reality that God is able to perceive.  We did the full circuit of outreach, starting off by eating dinner at a place that we know to be a site for trafficking of Eastern European women who are very tightly controlled and probably not allowed to leave the premises at all.  I wasn’t prepared at all for what to expect, but  about ten women were just lined up sitting at a table next to us just putting on make-up and waiting around, and during the course of our meal as I was watching and praying for them, several men came up one by one to pick out a girl, barter the price with the Thai pimp, and take the girl upstairs for thirty minutes for an hour.  Some of the girls left and came back while we were still sitting there.  It’s an interesting situation at this establishment, because we’re apparently on pretty friendly terms with the Thai traffickers even though they know that we help Thai women and that we’re there to care for the European women, too.  That relationship is what allows us inside, so I was instructed not to do anything antagonistic or aggressive that would endanger our long-term involvement there.  Really, having some kind of outburst at a customer wouldn’t do any good anyway, but I was in anguished inner conflict sitting there watching and feeling like, “human trafficking is happening right in front of you and you aren’t doing anything!”  So when this one guy came and sat down with the girls to laugh and chat for awhile before making his decision, I just stared at him, my blood boiling with silent anger.  He looked over at me a couple times, puzzled, and then would flit his eyes away quickly because it made him uncomfortable.  Eventually he stared back for awhile and I didn’t flinch.  I wasn’t making a face, just staring into his eyes, trying to remind him that he had a soul.  He finally made an annoyed shrugging motion at me, “what?”  I mimicked the motion back at him, then looked away before anything escalated.  I was so outraged with the graphic injustice of the situation that I really felt like I might lose control and just cry.  I was looking at each of the girls and at the men standing back and looking from one to the next, imagining who would be the most entertaining, and how low they could get the price down.  I was so disturbed.  I prayed and prayed and gripped and ungripped my water bottle and the side of the table.  We had dinner conversation, but I wasn’t tuned in to most of it.  I heard him bartering the price for the girl and watched him walk upstairs with her.  I could imagine what was coming next.  I felt the strong impulse to get up and talk to him– not to yell but to just ask him the question, “What are you doing here?  What are you looking for?” and to tell him that I wanted him to know that God loves him, and that God loves the women that he’s abusing, too.  As horrendous as he was being, I could see– or sense, more than anything else– his brokenness (I came across the website of an amazing ministry today that is reaching out to the sex tourists in Bangkok, and as I read through their prayer guide my heart was powerfully moved for the men fueling the sex industry: http://www.mstproject.com/Home.html.  Everyone please, please take a look; it will change your heart, too).  

 

I literally had a fire in my bones to go talk to him, but I was afraid of ruining our chance to ever come back, or endangering us or just doing something stupid.  I think God knew that it wouldn’t be good to let me talk to him, because he didn’t come back downstairs while we were there.  I had so much adrenaline that I couldn’t sit still, I just got up and paced around the place a bit, waiting, but I didn’t see him again.  Amazingly, under the circumstances, Emily was able to speak to some of the girls there.  I was glad for that at least.   

Next we were off to the bars.  I was with Annie and two others this time, and again we were walking into a more intense situation than I’d been in before.  On the way over I was just praying for God to give me strength and joy because I was still really shaken and I didn’t feel like smiling and socializing and starting over again in a new scenario to fight off the unbelievable darkness.  We went into probably the worst bar there.  There are lots of underaged girls, and the environment is a lot darker; the outfits they have the girls in look very sadistic and they’re basically topless, so it was jolting to walk in and see that.  The place was full of guys, but there weren’t very many girls working tonight for some reason, so they didn’t switch out the dancers every few minutes like they usually do.  That being the case, I wasn’t sure whether we’d talk to anyone or not.  An old British guy a couple tables over made sustained eye contact with me right off the bat, so I moved closer to talk to him but quickly discovered that he was hard of hearing and quite drunk already.  I turned around to face the stage and continued praying about what I was seeing.  Again, my eyes fell on one of the men there, across the room, so I prayed for him.  I was looking at the dancers’ faces, trying to make some connection when, after a few minutes, the girl dancing in front of me (you can pray for her as Bella) finally made eye contact.  We smiled and waied to each other and I motioned for her to come and sit with me when she was finished dancing.  Eventually, I bought her a coke and we were able to talk.  She spoke no English (I’m yet to have God bring anyone to me in the bars who does), so we had a few hang-ups where we’d have to circumlocute or just repeat ourselves several times and change the order of the words, but I discovered that she’s in her early thirties and has a teenage son who stays with her mom in Isaan (Isaan is the poorest part of Thailand, and a lot of the girls we meet in the bars come from there).  She told me she doesn’t like working where she does, but when I started explaining a little about NightLight she didn’t seem too interested.  From what I gathered in her rapid Thai, it sounded like she was skeptical that there could be another job outside of prostitution that would pay her the same amount of money to send home to her folks.  I told her I didn’t like her working there either, because men needed to respect her, but that I wasn’t talking to her just to convince her to apply for a job with my business.  I told her I wanted to talk to her because she is a child of God, who sees her all the time and who always loves her.  I told her that the God who created the world will make a way out for her.  That must have been somewhat confusing and surprising to her, but she seemed genuinely affected by it.  We managed some more small talk in our [partially] shared language, and for the first time that night I was able to zero in on just loving the woman sitting next to me and forget about all the awful things going on around us.  I was genuinely laughing and enjoying just getting to spend that time showing Jesus to her.  And then she had to go back up to the stage to dance and we had to head out of the bar before the sex shows started. 

Out front, we were sitting down and waiting for the other group when a grey-headed foreign man passed us slowly, looking back at us again and again with curiosity.  I waved at him and he walked over.  Finally, the conversation that had been inside me all night happened.  “Hey,” I said, “Can I ask you a question?”  “Sure.”  “Why are you here?”  He said he was just on holiday.  “But why HERE?” I asked, motioning towards the bars.  He wouldn’t look me in the eye.  He deflected the question by asking me how other guys around the area had responded to that question.  I told him I hadn’t had the chance to ask, but that I could surmise that they were there because they wanted intimacy or love or they felt lonely and like something was missing in their lives, and that was probably why he was there, too.  He acceded that was right, and I told him the only intimacy or love or meaning he would find in a place like that would be counterfeit.  We discussed for awhile the situation of the girls who work as prostitutes in Bangkok, because he had many of the same misconceptions that a lot of Western men have when they show up in Thailand.  I don’t think he’s let go of those lies yet, but I explained to him the situations of some of the women I know who have come out of prostitution, and I spoke in vague terms what our work is in Thailand, because he was predictably curious about what business a group of Western women would have in the go-go bars.  When God came up in my explanation of what was so wrong with what we were watching unfold on the street before us, he shared with me that he was an Atheist, and at that point I told him that surely he must still respect other human beings and that his entertainment or gratification wasn’t worth the toll it was taking on these people.  I told him that God loves him AND the women in the bars, and that I will pray for him.  You can pray for him, too.  His name is John.  

On the streets after we left, we ran into some of the African women that we’ve met before and talked to them for a bit.  

We headed over to the hotel we went to last week where the trafficked Central Asian women and their Middle-Eastern customers hang out.  I felt bad for the blondes in the group because they attract a lot of attention with that crowd (even though a lot of them mistake all of us for prostitutes).  This place and the first place we visited tonight, where trafficking is actually going on, have a very different feel than the bars because what is happening there is actually a crime, and so we have to be much more careful.  When we walked in this time, a table of three girls with dark hair and dramatic make-up smiled back at me and motioned for me to sit down with them.  Only one of the three spoke decent English, so she translated for the others and we just talked for awhile.  They claimed to have come to Bangkok independently, they never admitted to being prostitutes, and most of what they told me is probably untrue, but I didn’t push anything because I think at this hotel the key is just going to be building trust and relationship over time, and allowing time and opportunity for someone to vocalize a desire to get out.  All of the girls come with a mamasan the first time they come to Bangkok and have a debt to pay off.  But once they know what they’re doing they may come back on their own to make money, since the economies of most countries that once lay behind the Iron Curtain have gone down the pipes.  One of the women was my age.  It was her first time in Bangkok and she’d been here for only a few weeks.   

So yes… my Thai [slowly] improves, I become more comfortable  interacting with the dancers at the bars, and I learn what is permissible and what is dangerous to say and do around different people in different places.  I also ask Emily a lot of questions and watch everything she does, because she’s incredible at this.  Ultimately though, there’s no formula.  I’m learning to lean on the Holy Spirit completely, and I have to especially rely on Him to help me navigate the more precarious situations.  I am joyful to have the constant awareness of His presence with us and of His power over the darkness that surrounds us, and I know that ultimately He already has victory over all the evil that is running amuck for now. 

Weird things, great things.

Pete James leads worship at a church in northern England. He’s connected to the missions organization that funds my friend Emily, and he’s here this week with a camera crew to record the problem of human trafficking and broadcast the work that NightLight does to Christians back in the UK. Their goal is to break a lot of myths that people have about what’s actually going on and to equip the church to effectively respond to the real situation. Some men from the UK and elsewhere come to Thailand thinking that they’re actually helping out impoverished girls by paying them for sex, or that the girls deserve whatever they get because they’re asking for it by putting themselves out there… if you’ve been reading my other posts then you already know that these things couldn’t be further from the truth.

Anyway, Pete and I were talking earlier this week about the fact that it’s impossible to separate the supernatural element from the problem of prostitution in this country or from the success that NightLight has had in rescuing so many women out of it. What I mean by the supernatural element is that first of all, the perversion of sexuality, relationships, and the act of sex itself that is evident in Bangkok’s rampant prostitution has deep spiritual roots, and that secondly, the incredible transformations that have taken place in the women at NightLight have only taken place because of God’s miraculous intervention in actual events. Prostitutes aren’t just turned into worship leaders automatically. When the women tell their stories, the accounts routinely feature visitations by demons, angels, and even Jesus himself.
I’ve been avoiding relating the more tangible spiritual aspects of life here up to now because I’m a very rational person and I don’t want to sound crazy or weird. But I’ve been seeing some crazy weird stuff in the past two weeks, and as if my conversation with Pete today wasn’t enough to convince me that a spiritually white-washed version of things will give you a very incomplete picture of what’s going on here, God convicted me through the words of David in Psalm 40:9-10:

I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart.
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.

Since I want those verses to be true of me, I’m going to share God’s deliverance with you. When I talk about the spiritual darkness and the spiritual warfare here, I’m not just talking about vague generalities and euphemisms. I’m talking about things like the spirit that some of the Thai children in my house saw (for the second time in a week) sitting on one of the beds the first day that I arrived, or the demon-possessed beggar on my street who inexplicably speaks at least three European languages in addition to Thai and who immediately identified me as a Christian before I had spoken a word to her. In Thailand, from the time people are little zygotes in the womb, there are rituals and ceremonies that are performed to bind them to certain spirits. People pass down family spirits from generation to generation, they worship guardian spirits at their houses, they worship Hindu deities, they marry their children to spirits, they do things that we cannot even imagine to invite spirits into their houses and into their very beings for protection and good fortune. Many of the women in the bars also worship at a shrine to the spirit of the aborted fetus since there are so many abortions in their line of work. And the spirits are real. Jesus himself acknowledges Satan as a concrete personality and acknowledges Satan’s kingdom on earth (Matt. 12:26). As a result of all this spirit worship, people live under demonic influence every day, and this does not immediately come to a halt when people decide to follow Jesus, because there are still old covenants and contracts with demons that have to be broken, and because people have to allow the Holy Spirit into every part of their lives to completely change them. That’s a process that takes time. So ultimately, the war is already won, but the battles still have to be fought.  That initial fighting stage is where a lot of the women at NightLight are. Many of them have already become Christians, but they still suffer the effects of rituals that they’ve done (and that their families are continuing to do on a regular basis) to create soul ties between themselves and evil spirits. 

We have a room where people can come for prayer at NightLight, and we often spend hours in there with women. I’ve prayed with a few of them for healing, and all of them came in with pain and left without it.  I have no background of having that kind of experience, but I can’t deny that I have seen women completely overwhelmed here with the presence of God.  Sometimes, people have come in either with a minor physical symptom or wanting prayer for spiritual oppression and then it turns into intense prayer for deliverance during which spirits will often manifest in crazy, physical ways.  We pray to break old curses, covenants and contracts, we ask the Holy Spirit to fill the person so completely that there’s no place for anything to remain, we read scripture, we anoint the person with oil, and sometimes the demons even speak to us directly, mocking us, trying to convince us that they’ve already left, or even asking whether there is a shrine nearby where it can go upon leaving the person. 

We could argue the finer points, but there is undeniably an evil presence in the room, and there is unmistakably a lot of power in our prayers. There’s no real formula to it– it’s different every time– and I know that the women can’t just be faking it because the demons respond to specific commands and questions prayed in English even if the woman they are inside of speaks only Thai. And as proof of the powerful work that God does through this fervent prayer, women have been freed from demonic harassment, fits of rage, addictions, and all sorts of things after going through deliverance.

Just like you, I find all of these events incredibly strange, but it makes sense to me that since God has reclaimed these women from the kingdom of darkness, the darkness isn’t letting go without a fight. Jesus cast out demons and He said He was giving us the Holy Spirit so that we could do everything that He did and more. So what’s happening here in Bangkok right now is less perplexing to me than the lack of “signs and wonders” that has always boggled my mind when i compare the Church as it’s described in Acts and church as I’ve always known it. In the past two weeks, I’ve seen people healed by prayer, I’ve seen demons cast out of people in the name of Jesus, I’ve seen former prostitutes and girls who have been to hell and back completely changed and praising God, and and I’ve seen an incredibly fruitful ministry that is blessed because of intentional resistance to spiritual attacks (two of the women who work here have prayed to receive Christ since I got here!).

Please be praying for Kat. I wrote about her before– met her in the bar last tuesday, and we met up Sunday afternoon and hung out for several hours. I was a little nervous about that since she doesn’t speak any English, but it went well. She told me about her family, how she’s supporting her mother and her two-year-old son and is putting her younger brother and sister through school. Her son’s father left and, just like her father, doesn’t send them any money. She let me pray for her and I invited her to come to the church that meets at my house on Sundays and to come apply at NightLight. I saw her again at the bar last night during outreach and we talked some more, but she still hasn’t come by to ask for work. So please pray that God will make a way out for her and will take care of whatever is holding her back. Also pray that NightLight will be able to hire more women, because right now we’re technically at capacity (although we did hire two teenage girls this week who were new arrivals in Bangkok and were going to be required to start taking customers next month at the bar where they work).

Another night out in my neighborhood

Our last outreach was quite different from the first time.  First of all, at dinner a Vietnamese street child came and hung out with us at the table, covering our eyes from behind to make us guess who was behind us and telling us about her boyfriend (who she claims is twelve years old… let’s hope not).  She’s about six years old and sells gum on the streets.  Emily and some others at NightLight have known her for quite some time, and she’s adorable.  

As we were walking over to the bar area, we encountered several African women who were waiting for customers on the street.  Most of them were from Uganda, one was from Kenya, and they were all Christians, which makes them feel deeply conflicted about what they’re doing.  We talked with them, prayed with some of them, told them that God loves them no matter what, and that He’s here with them and will take care of them even though they’re far away from home.  One of them started crying and saying that she never wanted to do this, but she’s got two kids at home to take care of and what is she supposed to do?  They were very interested when we told them that next time we could bring them Bibles, and they also seemed very interested when one of our friends invited them to come to her church with her on Sunday.  It’s an international church and there are a lot of Ugandans who go there.  Of all the women we encounter, the Africans are probably the easiest to approach and to discuss things directly with because they’re already Christians and they’re very friendly and open to relationship.  Even so, I felt uncomfortable talking with them at first because I always feel awkward in situations where I feel helpless in the face of someone’s need.  We could talk and pray with them, but we have no immediate solution to their circumstances.  It makes me so sad.

We went into a different bar tonight, and it was pretty much the same set-up as before, except that tonight there were a lot of men in there and the girls all looked really young.  One of the ones I talked to had braces and claimed to be twenty-two, but there’s no way she was that old.  She told me that not only were her parents unaware of what she is doing here in Bangkok, but that her boyfriend is under the impression that she’s working in a salon.  There’s no way she could tell them, she says, but here parents are too old to work already, and there’s no way she could continue to send money home without this job.  Again, money and family pressure turn out to be the controlling factors that are keeping these young women and girls trapped in exploitation.  

As Emily and I were sitting at a table waiting for our new acquaintances to finish dancing, a British man came and sat down next to Emily with another male friend and one of the dancers.  He looked over and said with a friendly smile, “Hey, how are you doing?”  “Not very well,” she replied, expressing how the situation disturbed her.  And thus began an interesting conversation in which this guy– who has a wife and kids at home, as it turns out– reasoned jokingly that since he’s not taking these girls out afterward to have sex, there’s really no harm in his being there.  A second guy came up in the middle of the conversation, curious about what was going on and wondering why there would be any females there aside from those performing, and said outright, “I don’t know why I’m in here.  This place makes my skin crawl.”  They asked about what she were doing there and Emily explained NightLight and the seriousness of what’s going on in the bars regardless of whether the men actually have sex with the girls or not.  At the end of it, the guy next to Emily kissed her on the cheek and told her, “I like what you’re doing.”  Neither man actually left the bar, but I know that the joking attitude is the only possible defense mechanism they have for justifying their presence there and avoiding any deeper heart issues.  I pray that a seed was planted in them.  Contrary to what I could conveniently believe– what would really make the victim/perpetrator dichotomy black and white and really simple– these men aren’t horrible people.  They’re actually quite nice, and they really are trapped, too, by all of the layers of lies they’ve believed and excuses they’ve made for themselves that can allow them to sit there and watch naked teenage girls for entertainment.  They need Jesus.  They need hope, and their lives are empty, just like the lives of the girls they’re taking advantage of.  

After leaving the bar, we headed over to a hotel where lots of women are trafficked in from Central Asia to work as prostitutes.  This place had a very different atmosphere from the other places we’d been.  We have to be more careful there, because these women are more tightly controlled and more closely watched.  They all have fake names, and they are very suspicious of us.  Apparently, the rumor is that the group of strange Western women who come and sit in the seedy lounge with the middle-eastern men and try to strike up conversation with the prostitutes there are journalists.  We talked with a couple women in the bathroom when we first arrived, and that’s what they were whispering to each other.  This lie probably comes from their bosses, but hey, it works for us so we’ll take it.  The women there wear very dramatic make-up and primarily speak Russian.  Tonight, Emily sat down with a few English-speakers at one table, and our friend Kim put her Russian to work with two women who had just arrived in Bangkok yesterday and seemed emotionally fragile.  So as not to draw very much attention (the men around were already discussing us and eying us with curiosity), we didn’t want to crowd any one place, so my friend Amy and I just sat at another table to keep an eye on our friends and to pray.  I felt sort of like the scene belonged in a spy movie.  I wanted to be able to talk to people, but the opportunity didn’t come up for tonight.  My disappointed feeling made me realize (again) how task-oriented I can be and how I need to just sit back and realize that God is the one in control.  He will work how He wants, when He wants, through whom He wants, and I need to relax and do whatever He gives me to do, whether that be boldly approaching someone or praying in the background of a situation.  

We ordered some tea and hung out in the hotel for awhile, just watching people come and go and marveling over how many trafficked women were there and how most of them were new.  We were just thinking, how bad must things be where they’re coming from, for this to actually be better?  Servicing strange men all the time, being separated from everyone and everything they know, and working all night under the control of some heartless mamasan?  Many of them are beautiful enough to be models.  Many of them are smart, many of them are educated.  But there are no jobs in their corner of the world.  There’s really nothing separating them from the life that we have besides where they were born.  In different circumstances, our natural talents or abilities or education or any other merit couldn’t save us from selling our bodies in a foreign country either.  

 In the midst of a lot of broken lives and what can seem at times like hopeless situations, I know that God is already at work and He isn’t finished finished with this city.  Our God is mighty to save, and that is exactly what He will do.  Whether slowly or quickly, dramatically or piece by subtle piece, the Kingdom of God will come to Bangkok.  And it is already here in our midst in its beginning form: it’s in us, it’s in the transformed lives of women who have been rescued at NightLight, and it’s in the spark of hope or relief or friendship in the women’s faces when we talk to them in the streets and in the bars.  I’m so thankful to be right here in the thick of it. 

A Light in the Darkness

If you’ve been praying for me, then thanks. I know that it has paid off.  Every week, NightLight visits the women and girls who work in the heart of the red light district.  This tuesday was my first time to go.  There were six of us who went on outreach: myself, Annie (the woman who started NightLight and somehow manages to do the work of about thirty average humans to head up the business and the ministry), Beng (Thai staff who works in the office with me), Emily (another volunteer from the UK who’s working here indefinitely), and two other women from the UK and Canada who are here working with missions organizations in Bangkok. We meet at NightLight first and spent time praying about the outreach, and about NightLight in general, and for the women we already know here. Then we walk down a few sidestreets to an open-air restaurant near the bars and have dinner together.  Afterward, we split into two groups of three and walked a little ways into an area were there are a bunch of bars concentrated together, all facing one another.  Everywhere there are gaudy neon lights, everywhere is crowded with scantily clad girls, foreign men, and ladyboys.  We probably got there about 8:45 p.m. 

I’m with Emily and Beng, and we go first to a bar where we chat with one of the cashiers for a few minutes. She actually enjoys her job because she just works out in the front of the bar and doesn’t have to take any customers; just gets to make “farang friends”. Next, we actually go inside of another bar. It is sort of surreal going in there, but I’m not shocked. I am just very focused. There is a long table/stage in the middle with poles where girls are dancing, and they alternate groups every ten minutes or so; the girls who had danced would come walk around and customers could buy them drinks and talk with them.  They have a quota of how many drinks they’re supposed to get by the end of the night, and they have a quota of how many customers they have to take every month for sex. We sit down at a couple of tables, Beng and Emily at one, myself at the other, near where the girls come off stage. I wai to one of them and call her over to ask if she’d like a drink. I order her a coke and we start talking.  She speaks virtually no English, so the conversation proceeds in Thai, and despite the language barrier and the oppressively loud, thumping music that makes us both have to yell into each other’s ears, I understand the gist of everything. She says that her name is Kat and that her parents aren’t together, but she lives with her mom in their hometown not far from Bangkok. She is 23 years old, so she doesn’t go to school anymore (I don’t think she finished), but she has to make money to support her mom and her younger brothers. I notice the white threads tied on her wrists, and she tells me they are from when she went to the wat, for good luck. I told her I’m a Christian, that I go to the church to pray. She says she’s never been to a church before. When I ask her whether she likes working there or not, she initially says yes, but later admits that she’s been working here a few months already, and she doesn’t really like it but she doesn’t see another way to earn a living. I ask her whether her mom knows she was working there and she says yes. I tell her that I don’t like that she works in the bar because I’m a Christian. I told her that Jesus loves her and doesn’t like that she has to work here either, it’s not good. 

Our conversation is periodically broken up by her going up to dance on stage. While she is dancing, another girl, Robin, comes to sit with me. She is older– thirty-one– and has to provide for her children and her widowed father. He doesn’t know that she works there. She came from further away and has only been in Bangkok two weeks. She is very open about the fact gthat she doesn’t enjoy what she’s doing, and when she finds out that I’m working in Bangkok as well, making jewelry (I don’t mention NightLight), she immediately wants to know where and whether she could work there, too. Beng comes over to help explain in better Thai that she could certainly apply for a job there (we’re nearly at capacity and there’s a waiting list already, but women might be offered a job on the spot if their situation is especially desperate). We give her Beng’s cell number and she looks very excited. I really hope she can come work for NightLight. When we leave after about an hour, we ask God to bless the girls we’ve met and we smaile and say goodbye to the others onstage. 

It’s a slow night, maybe because of the rain; there are only a couple of men inside, and they don’t seem to be particulary enjoying themselves. They just sit there transfixed, with very serious expressions on their faces. I don’t know if they even LIKE watching the girls, but they’re obsessed with it. 

We briefly step into another bar, looking for the other half of our group and this bar is even worse. Like the ones at the first bar and the ones milling around everywhere outside, the girls onstage are hardly wearing anything. But it’s different here because it looks a lot more sadistic, and Emily tells me that a lot of the girls working here are underage. The three of us sit outside for awhile, staring across at all the bar entrances around and watching with disgust as some young Western tourists take nasty photos with girls. I’m astounded to see that some of them have even brought their Thai girlfriends with them to watch the shows. 

I pray for them, and for all the prostitutes and dancers I see walking by, [un]dressed for work. I’m getting antsy as we wait, wanting to go into another bar and talk to people.  Yes, buying drinks here is expensive, but it’s not a huge amount in the West and it’s definitely worth it to get some time to talk with these girls.  Emily tells me, however, that at most of the places, the sex shows start at 10 p.m. and they’re not a pleasant thing to watch, besides the fact that we’ll be back here every week.  After we were reunited with our group, we are deciding whether to go on to a hotel nearby and continue outreach there. I am all for it, but everyone is very tired.  

At the time I was frustrated, but the next day, I understand how draining our time there really is. We spent time on the way back talking with a woman nearby who was begging with her children, and I didn’t end up getting home until about 11 pm. I prayed for God to cleanse me from the disturbing images I’d collected and anything else that might have attached itself to me there, slept for eight and a half hours, and still woke up exhausted this morning. I can feel in my throat that a little more exertion would’ve made me go hoarse, and my ear is sore from being yelled into. But friday night we’ll stay out later since we won’t have work the next morning, and I’m looking forward to that. Once you’re there, in a place like that, you just want to reach out to as many peopls as you can and completely give everything you know how until there’s nothing left. But I suppose there’s something to be said for pacing yourself. 

Please pray for Kat and Robin (Annie said I need to change their names), and for the women at NightLight to be freed from the lie that a man will save them or give their lives meaning– a lot of the girls here are still living with that poisonous misconception, and a few of them are in really bad relationships because of it. And pray for me, for continual protection and cleansing of my soul and my mind, and for powerful prayers and ministry to these women. We’ve been spending hours in prayer with some of the women here at NightLight almost every day, but I’ll tell you about that later.

So apparently it’s the rainy season.

It’s been a long day.  This morning I traveled across the city for the first time on my own to meet a group of people going down to one of the slums to spend time with the children there and eat lunch.  I knew I needed to meet them at the last stop on the elevated train line, but I wasn’t really sure who “them” was or where they would be.  Thankfully, as we pulled into the last stop, I noticed a group of farang (foreigners) one car down.  They turned out to be some short-term missions group from Illinois who were somehow connected to New Song, the church I started getting involved with this week in Bangkok.  We took taxis into a slum neighborhood where the streets were just narrow sidewalks lined by canals with opaque, gray water.  Motorbikes and people shared the space, remarkably without injury (I wonder if there are ever any collisions that way?).  We ended up at a Chinese-style temple that serves as a community center, and hung out with the neighborhood kids and with about forty Thai college students from Chulalongkorn University who put on a bunch of games and brought food for everyone.  It was about a hundred degrees outside, but I can actually say I enjoyed running around with the kids, speaking to them in simple Thai.  They asked a lot about America, and about my boyfriend.  They also talked a lot about spirits, which they apparently see a lot, and they asked me whether we had those in America.  We talked a little about Jesus and how He is stronger than any spirits, so I don’t have to be afraid.  One of the girls asked for my cell phone number, and I gave it to her without thinking.  She’s probably about ten years old, and she had literally called me eight times since I left her yesterday morning!  Ha.  I can’t understand the majority of what she says over the phone, but maybe in a few weeks we can actually have a coherent conversation. 

After church that night, I went to dinner with some new acquaintances at a street stall. After that, myself and two of the guys walked what felt like a couple miles further down the street for mangos and sticky rice, and by the time we got there, the walking and my decision to wear nice shoes had resulted in large blisters chafed into the front and back of my left foot.  When they opened, I slipped halfway out of my shoe, and when that became painful I just went barefoot… but all I could think was, infection!

Then as we were sitting there savoring the delicious sweet sticky heap of goodness that I’ve been consciously or subconsciously craving for the past year, it started to rain– no, pour.  And it came suddenly, because if there had ben any gradual change in the sky up to that moment, we had been too close to the elevated train (BTS) to even see the sky.  Every few minutes, lightning flashed purplish daylight and thunder boomed.  While we were sitting under an awning and still getting wet with sideways rain, the Thais at one of the nearby street stalls (who had started a bonfire in their giant grease pan twice since we sat down) gave me a big plastic bag to put my purse inside of.  

Pretty soon it was 11 p.m. and the rain didn’t seem to be letting up, so we decided to go for it.  By this time the street was already flooded.  Ripples from the traffic on the main street rolled into the soi (small side street) as we forded it; now, walking through the murky water punctuated with newspaper and plastic trash, I was really worried about infecting my bloody feet.  

We were instantly soaked.  One of the guys needed to catch a taxi, but the other two of us soldiered on to the BTS station.  We walked up the stairs onto the platform, and first I got confused about which direction I needed to go and got on the wrong train with my buddy.  Escaping that just before the doors closed, I went down to another platform and found the one I needed.  The only person waiting for the train on that platform was a 27-year-old Thai woman named Goy who was holding an umbrella.  She insisted that I share it with her and pulled me right up against her to make room, in spite of the fact that I was drenched.  She spoke virtually no English, but we chatted for awhile as we waited and then kept talking once the train got there.  I talked about wanting to go to the beach here sometime, and then she immediately asked for my cell number… so I’m not sure if she’s planning on taking me there, or just plans on spending time together in general, but she was incredibly warm and friendly.  She made sure that I not only had her number in my phone by the time we left, but that both of our names were spelled correctly in each other’s phones. Ha. When I got off I was confused about which side of the street to exit on.  I know which stop is mine, but it’s at Soi 7, and I live on Soi 10, three streets away.  This was only my second day to ride the BTS and my first day navigating it alone.  I could already see that the street below was entirely flooded and the water was swelling onto the sidewalks.  In the flooded darkness, it was hard to pick out familiar landmarks, so I asked Thais at least three times which direction I should go and got conflicting answers with each try.  I ended up standing on a step with a sleazy British man, contemplating which way to wade on the submerged sidewalk.  He was stranded at the bar where he had probably been scouting out prostitutes who were half his age all night.  I wandered around for a long time, sometimes in ankle-deep water and sometimes on wet concrete where a cockroach would periodically run across the cobblestone in a frenzy.  I ended up at Soi 3, seven blocks from where I needed to be.  Some concerned passerby had told me she thought I should get a taxi, but the traffic was gridlocked and I wasn’t about to just sit in that river for an hour or more.  At this point, my dress was soaked through and I probably looked a little exasperated.  “Hey, come over here! C’mere!”  Some other old foreign guy with a camera was taking pictures.  a group of them laughed when I turned around and stared at them, but I just walked over to a storefront on the side of the walkway to dig through my purse for my cell phone and figure out someone to call about what side of the street I should be on and all that.  I had taken off my shoes again, but I was worried about having to cross the street barefoot since the opaque water was deeper there than on the sidewalk.  Just then, some sympathetic Thai women standing around came over to give me a plastic bag for my shoes and suggest that I get some sandals.  They had closed their shop already, but they lifted the garage door again to let me in and buy some cheap flip-flops.  After that, things were pretty easy.  One of my shoes almost floated away while I was crossing the rapids in a side street, but at least I knew what direction to walk and I even ended up being on the right side of the road.  I got home a little before midnight, and I had never before felt so accomplished to have arrived there. 

The City of Angels

First full day in Bangkok.  The flight was long, especially sitting in front of the elderly Chinese men whose ancient feet with thick yellow toenails kept waking me up as they stuck them around the back of my seat to prop them up on my armrests, but I have miraculously had no jet lag at all so far.  Upon landing, I discovered that my only contact’s cell phone number was missing a digit and that I actually had no idea where in that huge airport I was supposed to be meeting her, but forty minutes after landing, I followed the crowds down a big corridor and eventually picked out Lyndsey’s platinum hair among the throng of people waiting to pick up passengers… that was a big relief! 

 

We met up with a couple of other volunteers, Katie and Emily, at Starbucks and hung out for several hours before meeting up with some more farang friends for Mexican food to celebrate Cinco de Mayo– an unexpected culinary experience for my first day back in Southeast Asia!  The other volunteers are great.  All of them are at least seven years older than I am, but they’ve been more than happy to take me under their wings to show me the ropes, they are all very strong, passionate people who love Jesus, and they’ve been really easy to relate to. We’ve had some great conversations in the past 36 hours, really. They’re from all over, and one of them has an amazing British accent that I will most likely pick up by the end of the summer.  Ha.  I am already SO thankful that God has provided me with a strong community here.  

 

I have a room in one of NightLight’s volunteer houses in the Nana district, a few blocks away from the office.  It’s exciting to me to be right in the middle of the city, with all the hundreds of people milling around on sidewalks, dodging the motorbikes that share those same sidewalks, and the street vendors with fresh mangos and meat kebabs and pad thai.  There is an interesting mix of Thais, Middle Easterners, muslim women with head scarves, Indians, transvestites, and Westerners.

 

 The house has four stories.  On the third floor lives a young married couple who are in the research phase of starting a team in Bangkok for Word Made Flesh, a ministry I read/got excited about in the book The New Friars last summer.  They have two very young daughters who are adorable.  Above them live an older Thai woman and a younger Thai woman with her baby, and I also share the second floor with a Thai mother and baby– all three of them came to Bangkok to work in the bars and now work for NightLight instead.  The ground floor has a kitchen and a large open space that serves as a daycare for NightLight women’s children during the week and as the venue for the church that some of the women have created for themselves on Sunday afternoons.  It’s a cool set-up.

 

Today I went to worship with the women, hung out at the office getting to know everyone, toured NightLight’s buildings, spent some time in prayer with the leadership, and did some other more bizarre things that would be difficult to explain in a blog.  The offices consist of three buildings, several stories each, with different rooms where groups of women are designing jewelry, beading necklaces, embroidering bags, burning clasps together, managing inventory, etc.  It’s a very laid-back, communal atmosphere, but they  All in all, it was a good day and I’m looking forward to more like it.  

 

Bangkok is ridiculously hot, humid, and polluted (volunteers have been sent home in the past with something akin to the black lung), so it was disheartening the first night not to figure out how to use the AC.  I have it working now, but I suppose that aside from the morning sweat factor, the temperature doesn’t matter much anyway once my body is just lying unconscious in the room.  The heat and the sweat are almost constantly there, but strangely enough it’s not something that bothers me the way it would at home.  Psychologically accepting it as a given may have something to do with that.  That the heat in Bangkok is not the most oppressive element in the city may have something else to to with it.

 

The darkness in this city is very strong.  Everywhere I go, I see women selling their bodies.  On my way to work today I passed a group of young girls dressed in school uniforms, putting on heavy makeup and sitting outside of a bar to flirt with the foreign men who walk by– at nine in the morning!  During the day I see young Thai girls walking hand in hand with gray-haired foreign men, and many of the women I pass on the street are dressed like prostitutes and probably are.  As I left church tonight, there was a group of young girls in skimpy dresses sitting out in front of a hotel waiting for customers.  It’s shoved in my face everywhere, and it’s out in the open: the complete perversion of sexuality and the exploitation of young girls, some of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.  Reducing the depth of an entire person to a body, and turning that body into a commodity to sell for cheap, completely refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the person who lives in that body.  I love Thai culture, I do.  But it is incomprehensible to me that as a society, Thai culture allows this to carry on.  It is beyond my understanding that Thai parents could knowingly send their teenage daughters to Bangkok for school holidays to work in the bars and earn money to continue their education.  And it is beyond my understanding that middle-aged Western men, who have mothers and sisters and maybe even wives and children of their own back at home, come here to prey upon these women and children for their own selfish gratification.  I am seriously disturbed by this, and I hope that I am disturbed every single day.  Because if I can adjust to a mad culture and it no longer bothers me, then I’ll know that I have lost my sanity, too. 

 

Coupled with this complete disregard for humanity is the intense spiritual charge that I feel in the city because of all of the idols, spirit worship, Buddhist ceremonies, and Hindu rituals that go on among the people.  There is some really intense spiritual warfare going on here, and I think all of the dark spiritual ties formed through demonic rituals are directly connected to the intense injustice and brokenness associated with the sex industry.  The Enemy really has a firm hold on this city and this nation, and the rampant sex trade is just one way in which that is expressed.  It will be important over the next few months to rely on powerful prayers, and to understand that these women’s situation as prostitutes is not only psychologically damaging and physically harmful to them, but is also holding them captive spiritually and keeping them from ever hearing about Christ.  THAT is what makes reaching them so urgent.