Battling for a child
We've been on outreach a lot these days with visitors. Sunday night a team from Adventures in Missions met a young teen working at one of the bars. "Mae" says she is 15, but looks 14. Short and thin, not over 85 pounds, she is just a child. A baby. She said she has completed 8th grade, and has only been working at that bar for a few days.
Mae says her dad, 36, and mom, 40, are at home in the Buriram province, the home of many thousands of bar girls. They sent her here to work, she says, but they don't know she's working in a bar. That is possible but not necessarily true.
Tonight the group went back to see her, and I joined them a while later as they were sitting with her teaching English and doing little puzzles--an activity that only made Mae's youth more incredibly obvious. I ended up spending a long time essentially begging Mae to quit. She does happen to be friends with some of our newer teen girls, and stays near The Well. She was cautious, saying she needs to send money to support her parents. If that's true, her parents are most likely drinking, drugging, gambling or all 3. I finally got her to agree to have the team pay her bar fee, take her home, and pick her up in the morning for 9am class at The Well. I will call Bee, our volunteer teacher tomorrow, and ask her to get Mae's parents' phone number and call them to explain The Well and ask their permission for Mae to join. I promised Mae that if she quit now, I wouldn't tell them where she had been working.
We've lost battles like this one, and every time it is heartbreaking. I'm praying hard.
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Reply #1 on : Wed July 25, 2007, 19:01:39