[First, a word to my faithful, fearless readers and supporters: This particular account may not be for everyone. In it I attempt to describe a few hours that I spent inside a red light district in Bombay. What I saw was extremely influential and gave me perspectives that I never thought imaginable. It has been exceedingly hard to create an account of my experience, but I am doing it. I write because I am truly compelled to do so. I am going to be honest about every bit of it, because that is what these people deserve. And so, my words are true. No candy coating. No softening. Just as it is. With that said, please know that it is not my intention to worry any of you, so please do not. The Lord had a purpose for me in going there, and that purpose was accomplished. The Lord’s hand of protection guarded me the entire time, and I was never in immediate danger. And further, He brought me out with a changed heart. I am not going back, so again, I ask that you do not worry about me or become upset about the risk we took in venturing in.
I said that my words may not be for everyone, but I earnestly desire that they are. If not now, perhaps someday. The things I have seen are things that everyone should be aware of. Not everyone has an opportunity like I have had to see these things with their own eyes, but I pray that regardless of experience, no one remains ignorant of the suffering that fills our world. And so for now, for your own hearts, try to allow my words take you there so that you may see. Read on and do your best to experience what I saw. I know that my words cannot adequately describe the state of life I observed, but I will do my best. And more importantly than anything else, love and pray for these people with every bit of who you are.
One last thing, cameras are not allowed to be taken into these areas. I know that many of you love pictures to accompany my words, for it does make it easier to follow, but this time I ask that you read to the end, despite the lack of images and the lengthiness of this entry.]
Tuesday, June 23
It was more than commonplace when I was a child to find me curled up beside one of my parents as they read to me. The words on the pages never failed to enrapture me; I just couldn’t get enough. The older I became, the more this love grew, and to this day, give me a book and I’ll be happy.
One of my all time favorites was Go, Dog. Go! Dad and I both loved it, and it was probably as popular between us as Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is, of course, hard to beat.
I have spent weeks trying to process the things I saw and experienced at the Sonapur Red Light District two weeks ago. I have not been able to write about it until now, for I have not known what to say. Yes it was awful. Yes I was sick that night and many after as my mind kept running over what I saw. Yes it was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And yes, I have never felt God’s protection over me more in my entire twenty years.
And further, I have never felt more helpless, more useless.
The experience seems to have been a dream, one that I cannot escape as I continue to scan through the countless images that are now forever imprinted in my brain and in my heart. The words whore and prostitute have newfound meanings to me, as dozens of faces now perfectly correspond with those commonplace nouns. But they are not so commonplace to me any longer. I have seen the exact definition of those words. Those two words mean
Brokenness
Degradation
Aching
Corruption
Entrapment
Ownership
Manipulation
Obligation
Survival.
The conditions of the women, children, and men I saw were dreadful. I typed the word “dreadful” into my dictionary, and one phrase that came up was “inspiring awe”. Following this trail, I searched the meaning of awe. Encarta defines awe as “a feeling of amazement and respect mixed with fear that is often coupled with a feeling of personal insignificance or powerlessness”. This is exactly what my heart ached with. Now, these emotions of amazement and respect that I experienced are not the typical feelings I usually associate with these words. It’s not the amazement and respect that you are thinking of. It’s disbelief. It’s acceptance of a life that I can hardly bare to imagine living. Acceptance because what else can you do with it? And mixed with fear, yes. There are endless possibilities of things that could have gone wrong that day as a group of American girls ventured into a red light district in India. Things that one cannot think about or dwell about because in doing so, it would not be leaving it in God’s shielding hands. And even more so, fear for the suffering that many of the women here face. Fear for the children that are witnesses everyday to darkness at work. Fear for the small girls there that, in just a few years, will be placed alone with a man for the first time because their virginity is worth a great price. A price. Money that goes directly into the hands of the man or woman who owns them. And further, personal insignificance or powerlessness. I think that these words clearly speak for themselves. I felt so inconsequential that day. I did not matter. These women mattered. These young, barely teenage, girls holding their own babies mattered. The brothel owners that stood over these young girls with their babies mattered. The eunuchs disguised as women, that often run sex trafficking deals, they matter. The men that were there, casually living among the women by day and partaking in unthinkable routines by night, they matter. Each of these individuals that we walked by, the crowds that gathered to see us in the narrow alleyways outside the never-ending streets of brothels, the stares emanating from the men that were an uncomfortable, dangerously different type of stares than we had ever received in India, each of these people are who matter. And despite the important place they held in my mind, I felt as if there was nothing I could do for them. I felt completely powerless.
In the book Go, Dog. Go!, all of the dogs drive around in their cars, bikes, whatever. They constantly run into red lights, and of course stop. When the light changes to green, the dogs go! (Hints the title!) I have been thinking about this book as it parallels with my experience. It first came to me as I sat contemplating the words “red light district”. What does this mean, and what does it now look like to me? This childhood favorite aligned with this day as I found myself obeying the instructions of our leader. We were constantly obeying her signals, her red and green lights. She would stop, we would stop. She introduced herself. They couldn’t take their eyes off of us. She began talking to these women about the love of Jesus, and the life that He offers. They continue to look at us, confused as to why we are there. I found myself asking the same question that was clearly illuminated through their eyes. Why was I here? I could, in no way, communicate with these people, nonetheless even begin to comprehend the life they live and the choices they are forced to make and live with. But she continued. Sharing the love of Christ with them, and then she would call us around them. We laid hands on these women, we prayed. With all my heart, I lifted these women in prayer, I begged God for an escape for them. And then, as simply as it began, the light switched back to green and we moved. She said go, and we would go. And so we followed; we stopped and started when she said the word. I felt like one of the characters in my book, stopping and going without any reason except that I was told to do so. My mind could not process any other actions except go, stop, pray, go, stop. I couldn’t wrap my mind around where I was and what I was doing. The experience felt so unreal; it was as if I was simply observing something out of a movie I had once seen. But it didn’t seem that I was there, seeing these things in real life. For if I was seeing them, then they truly existed. Could this be real? Had such evil truly broken into God’s good creation in this way and destroyed it, brought it to this devastatingly, disgustingly low point?
What was I doing here? I intermixed these questions with my continuous prayer to God for safety. My answer came. It came with the tears of a woman, a prostitute, crying out to God for an escape from her life. My answer came with the tears of my own that matched identically with the tears that poured from her eyes. We are one, we are the same. We are simply two children of God, equally loved and equally viewed in His eyes. His heart aches for her suffering, and so did mine. Her desperation was my answer. To see the immediate openness in this woman’s heart after meeting us for the first time and then being told about Jesus. Joyce’s words and the moving of the Holy Spirit brought this woman to a state of weeping; crying out to the Lord for an answer. This happened with her and with another, who invited us to sit inside her home. I found myself sitting upon her bed, her workplace, with a curtain drawn up above my head and about three feet of open space below me, space enough for a child to sleep. I sat there drinking a sprite that she bought for me, with the money she had made. What was this?! Even though I simply stood beside these women, listened to their foreign language, and laid my hands on them and prayed, I believe that the love of God was felt through our hands. That, to me, is an answer and a reason enough to be there. Our presence may have simply been enough. And without our presence, Joyce later told us that she may have never had that opportunity to go to those women. If it took us being in India to allow her to enter and share God’s love, this trip was more than worth it. And to then return to the children’s center just outside these sordid streets that we had worked at twice, to see those children’s faces after just experiences the places they live, that is enough. To then learn that the way these children are brought out of the red light district and sent to places like the Joyce Meyer’s center is by sending people into the brothels as we had done and build relationships with their mothers, that is enough. To hear the different stories of the women and their children, of the escapes and success stories of a few, that is enough. And to know that there are people in the world and here in India that make it possible, that will spend the equivalent of one hundred dollars, which is months and months of savings here among the poor, to buy a child from the brothel owners, to save their lives, that is enough.
So why was I there? To make a difference. It may have been a small one, one that I may never see, but one smile, one prayer could have changed a life forever. But what do you do about it? Do you, as I mentioned earlier, simply accept the things you see and hear about because there is nothing you can do about it? No. You step outside your comfort zone. You hold the hand of one who holds on so tightly in hopes that their grasp will last, will pull them out of their entrapment. You believe in those women who are viewed as a degraded group in society, you let them see that you place no judgment on them for the decisions they have been forced to make. You believe in those that were not given a choice and show them the true meaning of love. You hug those children that have such high hopes and longings for a future because of the loving hands of those that invest time in them. You allow Christ to shine through you to these people that have no hope. But not everyone has a chance to do these things; to hold these woman, to hug their children, to personally express your love for them. I have been honored, I have been blessed with the opportunity to do these things. So what can you do? What can I do when I leave in two and half weeks? We can ask God that a way is provided to help each one of these precious women flee from their snare. We pray for the salvation of those that do not know our Lord. We can support those organizations that are already in place, to help do the dirty job of buying these women and children out of this horrid slavery. And you can pray for me, and for those around the world that are involved in these efforts to make a difference. And in doing so you choose not to accept the corruption of the world, but to be a part of changing it.
