Operation Extreme Love, Pattaya, Thailand - Day 3, Wednesday

Breakfast in the hotel is delicious, and it sets one up for the busy day! There is such a lot of food to choose from. Of course rice is always one of the options... and a very delicious fish in butter sauce dish... many Thai foods... fruit, salad, toast.... eggs, French toast with maple syrup... just about anything you would like. No cheese though! For breakfast today I had an omlette, made with such care by the chef. He honoured me not just in the making of the food, but in the way he made it. The Thais are people of honour. It seems peculiar that sex tourism, which is so dishonouring, thrives alongside the honouring culture.

We started our sessions today with an introduction to Tamar, a YWAM organisation that helps girls who would like to leave the sex trade to train for other jobs. Tamar offers shelter,vocational  training and support, and works to restore the girl to her community. In many cases the girls have come from North Thailand where there is a lot of poverty, and the elusive dream of a rich Western husband attracts them to Pattaya. Tamar was founded in 1999 in Pattaya, and now also has a prevention centre in the province of Isaan. This year they hope to open another two centres in Isaan. Prevention, as we all know, is better than cure...


We also heard about True Friends Fellowship, which reaches out to young people, homeless people, and newcomers to the city. Part of Bridges of Hope Foundation, their Welcome Centre provides job counselling for individuals coming to Pattaya who could be at risk for entering the sex trade. True Friends meets on Sunday afternoons, and also joins with a group of homeless people on Dong Tan beach for lunch and fellowship on Wednesday mornings.
 
After a short break, we signed up for different teams and some went onto the streets with Tamar to speak to bar girls, and others went to the beach. Craig and I joined the team that went to Dong Tan  beach with True Friends Fellowship. This is a weekly event;  they take food to the beach, where they eat together with homeless people and socialise with them, and try to help with various problems they may be experiencing. To give one example, if a person is HIV positive, but does not have an ID card, he cannot go to the hospital for medical treatment. True Friends helps him get an ID card so that he can receive medical help. They also keep an eye out for newcomers to the city, and if they are youngsters, try to arrange for them to be sent back home again to safety. Young teens come to Pattaya because they think they will get rich here. But they don’t know what kind of exploitation happens. 

Prayer walk on the beach

We started off with a walk along the beach pathway, praying for the people we would spend time with that day. We came back along the beach. It was lovely to get my feet in a warm sea again . Near the car park, True Friends volunteers had set up mats, and there were already a number of homeless people there. We sat down and sang for a while and others came to join us. 

Worship followed by lunch with homeless people

One fellow, Keng, stank of cheap alcohol, but he was so kind, jumping up to get water for us and making sure that we all had a good spot to sit. I talked with him for a long time. The 
most significant thing I have found out these 
two weeks is that truly, the poor are Jesus in a distressing disguise, just as Mother Teresa said. She said of her nuns: “We must therefore be proud of our vocation, which gives us the opportunity to serve Christ in His poorest…in the slums, Jesus chooses as His disguise the miseries and poverty of our people in the slums. You cannot have the vow of charity if you have not got the faith to see Jesus in the people we contact. Otherwise our work is no more than social work…we do it for Somebody.” 


And she also said “...for whatever we do to them, to the little ones, we do it to Jesus. He has said so, it must be so.” Yes! I understand this on a deeper level now. Underneath the offensive, unpleasant exterior, is a person. A real person, with dreams, hopes and aspirations, just like me. And often a person who is carrying so much sorrow that you wonder how he or she is managing to survive at all. It is eye-opening. No-one gets their life into such a mess without some deep and painful reason. For example....Keng came to Pattaya from the poverty stricken North East of Thailand as a young man. He hoped to find a way of making good money, and dreamed of making a better life for himself. In Pattaya he met a man who said he loved him, and who took him with him to Switzerland, where Keng lived with him for a season. Sadly, after a while, this man found himself another boyfriend. Keng, stranded  far from home, and on a tourist visa, eventually made enough money to go back to Thailand by selling himself. Back in his village he found nothing but rejection, and so he returned to Pattaya. By now he had begun drinking, and at some point he became a drug addict. Although someone of whom he speaks highly rescued him from his situation, and found him a job cooking for a children’s home, his behavioural problems (he said he has a problem with anger), resulted in him losing his job. Now he lives on Dong Tan beach, Pattaya. He is 36 years old. I said that was young, and not too old to make a change. He just laughed... but with very sad eyes.

Meow interpreting for Craig 

Later, lunch in hand, a man caught my eye. He was sitting alone on the low brick wall behind us. I invited him to join us, but he said no. So Craig and I went to sit with him. The waves of sadness that emanated from him were huge and very tangible. I gave him my lunch. Suddenly I had lost my appetite. After he had eaten, I got hold of an interpreter, and said that I felt much sadness coming from him... was this true? He said ‘Yes’.


Do you remember what I said my clues were from the Treasure Hunt the night before? I had beach, sadness, broken... and a sense that some of my treasure would be found the next day? I was encouraged to see that God knew about this man, and that He is bigger than all our hurts, and He is always present... So  I said that God cared. That He knew. That He had asked me to come to Thailand, because He loved the people of Thailand. Him included. I asked if I could pray and ask God to help him. He said ‘Yes’. I prayed, and then Craig talked with him, and prayed with him some more. He prayed with Craig to ask God to be part of his life and to help him with his sadness. Afterwards, he said he felt lighter. And he smiled.... 

And he smiled....

So maybe it’s not much, what we could do for him. But maybe it did help him a little; to know that for that moment, someone cared?  Back at our hotel our interpreter told me that she knows this man, and that he is HIV positive, and that he too lives on the beach, because he has nowhere else  to go. 


Meanwhile, a woman had come to sit next to me, and the moment I stopped praying for the man, she interrupted and said please could I pray for her as well. I asked what for... and she said started off talking about her business and so I prayed for her that it would be blessed and that things would go well for her, and then she got to the real issue, namely that she wanted to follow Jesus;she said that she had been thinking about it for a while but that now she had made her decision. So it was very special to lead her in the sinner’s prayer.And as I was praying for her, I asked God if he would please help her to leave the bad things and to follow the good and she looked at me with a shocked expression and asked if I was a fortune teller! I said no. She then asked how it was that I knew exactly what she was thinking, because at the moment I had prayed this about the bad and the good, that had been her precise thought. Amazing stuff! So I said that God knew everything, and that I had just prayed what I thought was important. We were both encouraged!  Patricia King commented about the Lord “giving us the treasures of darkness, the secret wealth of hidden places..." These people are treasures of darkness. They are secret wealth of hidden places. They are the treasures of the kind Jesus spoke of in Luke 15. And when we find them, their beauty shines forth...

Back at the hotel, we had a group photo taken, and then the founder of Tamar spoke. Tamar is a wonderful advocate for the bar girls of Pattaya. An excellent ministry in every way, it has been good to learn from and to team with them this week. We then said farewell to Mike and Mark (M &M) of Blood-N-Fire ministries; they fly home to the USA this evening. It has been such a privilege to run shoulders with such giants these last 10 days. 

Right now I am comfortably settled in my air-conditioned hotel room. Craig is out with the other men of the team – they had a special men’s session this evening, including dinner. I am really tired and I am looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow will be another good but challenging day. My group will be praying for the sick on the beach in the afternoon, and spending time with ‘ladyboys’ in the evening.