The Tamar Centre

One of the ministries we worked with was the Tamar Centre. It is a centre that offers prostitutes a way out of the trade by training them in card-making, coffee shop, hairdressing, bakery and English lessons. They run a bible study three times a week, and church on a Sunday. It also offers housing if the girl really is in need of shelter. Three times a week they offer free English lessons to the women from the bars- this is the open door. The women in the bars speak little or no English, and believe that if they are able to speak English they would have a better chance of getting a foreign "boyfriend."
So what did we do? We went with some of the people from the Tamar Centre on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays into the bars all around Pattaya creating relationship with the women and inviting them to the free English lessons. Three times a week we would sit with the women in the class and help them learn the language, but also build relationships. Thai women are incredibly beautiful and have such pure hearts. They are so sweet. I see why it is so easy to take advantage of them: they are such a giving people with a heart to please. We became good friends with the regulars, and the girls on the team loved it.
We were brainstorming as to how we could show the centre to more women, and we decided on an idea. We decided that we were going to each buy a girl (so six girls in total) for the evening from one of the local bars. So we did just that, and it took a while to convince the women to come with us (yes it was a bit awkward because they did not understand our intention). We each had a translator and we brought the six girls out to a BBQ buffet to just let them escape the trade for a few hours and to share with them their worth. It was incredibly fun to get to know them and they were so appreciative of what we were doing, they actually found it really hard to receive (which breaks my heart). Just listening to their stories was enough to break any one's heart. Some had husbands who had left them, and so it was their responsibility to care for their kids and their families back home. They wanted to send their kids to school. Some shared about the foreign boyfriends who broke their hearts. They shared about how they were waiting for their fairytale ending with a foreign rich man. One of the girls was engaged to a man from Chicago and yet she was still working in the bar. The most influential thing they said was that no one had ever done anything like that for them before. They called us "beams of light," and all we did was simply take them out to dinner. Some of them went straight home that night, but some of them returned to work.
Two of them came to the centre the next day, and on our last day there, those same two joined us in church. I do not know where they stand today, but I trust that God has already begun His work in their hearts.

"I saw the tears of the oppressed- and they had no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors- and they have no comforter. And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun." -Ecclesiastes 4:1-3