Four of us come together to pray, but spend 45 minutes pouring out the stuff we’ve been seeing in the city first. We cut discussion short and get to prayer.
Rose and I jump on a bus while our two friends take off on bikes.
The walk from the bus stop is the usual…rich Western tourists, rich Muslim tourists, and old men with young “girlfriends”.
We see our friend Ron the second we get to the redlight district. We trade pleasantries and he lets us know which of our friends is around in the redlights today.
We find Nuy right away. She shows us her pretty-smelling flowers, asks Rose if she has coloring, and then pulls us over to a storefront to get started. The coloring pages aren’t to her liking, so Rose draws the dresses that are hanging while Nuy colors them. I offer her a banana but she’s not interested. The rich guys and young Thai women are walking past, looking towards us with bemusement or confusion. After a while two of the young women working the nearby market stands join us. One colors while the other practices her English letters with Rose. They are enjoying themselves – we’ve never interacted like this before. A while later Nuy asks if we’ll go with her to the redlights. We agree and pack up, leaving crayons for the woman who is still coloring away.
Nuy asks for grilled chicken wings and we oblige. She picks out 3 wings on a stick, and then hands one to me and one to Rose. She gives me her flowers to keep too. We go down the street and find her little sister, then talk to her mom and her baby brother. We offer them bananas, and the 2-year old boy is overjoyed. Nuy asks if we can get one more chicken wing stick, and we say okay, but she has to promise to share with her sister. While the wings warm we say our goodbyes and walk out to the street to see if our friends are back on their overpass yet.
As we leave we pass the young woman, who is working hard on her coloring page and more than halfway done. It’s a picture of the father welcoming home the prodigal son.
On the street we pass mother after mother begging with children. A young lady with two tiny sleeping girls – they’ve been around for a long time. She’s a national, but they are homeless in the Bangkok area. We exchange small talk, give them some bananas, and go on our way. Another lady with a slightly older child. She introduces herself as Ti and her daughter as Thom. She tells Rose that she has no place to sleep in Bangkok, and from her appearance I wonder if she is mentally disabled. She says she fell a few days ago, and shows Rose where it hurts. Rose offers her condolences, and we give her some bananas and keep going. The mother we always see with the two little ones and the puppies….another mother after her with two little girls….a tiny barefoot girl we’ve never seen before selling gum…
After much walking we spot kids on our overpass. Is it them? We get to the top and see 6-year-old Lokia and 2-year-old Pim. But where’s mom? We sit with them, Rose talking to Lokia and me trying to entertain Pim enough to keep her from crying for her mom. People walk past, looking at us strange. Finally their mom, Dtao, comes back…she’d been looking for Khuoy. Khuoy is her 11-year-old son. She hadn’t seen him for four days, since the family was taken into custody without him. Rose and I and the staff here had searched for him on the streets during that time to no avail. I begin to feel sick about the situation. While Rose talks to Dtao and then calls our staff to give them the update, I bow my head and pray desperately that he’s safe somewhere and will be found soon.
Dtao decides to go looking again. Rose joins while I call the staff so they know where we’re going. I lose track of them, but the other two guys catch up, and soon we find Rose and the family…and they’ve found Khuoy! He is upset after having to be alone 4 days, and he’s very tired. I don’t know if he’s been eating or where he’s been sleeping. He curls up on their mat to sleep while our staff leader talks to Dtao about their situation. The conversation gets uncomfortable and soon we excuse ourselves. Rose leaves all the crayons with Lokia. Rose and another friend are able to go talk to a new family they spotted across the street, which turns out to include the little barefoot gum seller we’d seen earlier. It’s getting close to 1am, and we decide to call it a night.
What did we accomplish tonight? I don’t know. Good is always mixed with bad here…thank God that Khouy is okay, but the family doesn’t seem any closer to leaving than they were before. It was fun to have the storekeeper color with us and little Nuy, but it’s so hard to see more new families out on the streets. And always there’s the context of the redlights and the hundreds of men who buy women walking on by. In the end, we’re just trying to maintain our relationships, start new ones, and let people know that we care. In time perhaps they’ll trust our love enough to take the next step. We know people in their home country who might take them in, get them an occupation, get the kids in school…but they don’t trust people in their country to really help, or they don’t think they could support themselves financially there like they can here, or they can’t bring themselves to leave the life they’ve known for years. In time perhaps more plans will come together and the staff here will have more opportunities to offer them. Right now all we can offer is our friendship, and our assurances that the people we know who want to help them really are good people. But what we want them to know above any of that is that we love them, we love them because God loves them, and he wants so much more for their lives than this.
Keep praying for us. Please pray for them.
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