In February the Kids Club program at Rahab’s House was expanded to five days a week.  This was made possible through a team of volunteers from Hard Places Community who work the program every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Led by Hard Places’ director Alli Mellon, the group is doing an outstanding job of sharing Christ’s love with dozens of children, and their efforts have resulted in a substantial increase in children attending the program all five days.  Below Alli shares some of her group’s experiences.  She’ll be sharing more in the future, in the meantime please keep her and her team in your prayers.

February 2009

This week began our ministry in Svay Pak! My partner in this ministry is Ruthie Nickell, a precious girl who was a pre-school teacher back home. She’s perfect for this! Also, our Dutch team member, Christina Fokker, is going with us one day a week to teach dance to the girls. On Wednesday, we three girls piled into a tuk tuk with two white boards and all of our arts and crafts supplies, and realizing there was no room for our translators, hired a motorcycle to carry the two Khmer guys. Somehow, after the moto got lost many times, we all made it Svay Pak. It is forty-five minutes down a long, dusty, two-lane highway out of the city…as we ride, the road becomes darker and darker as we pass through an entire stretch of Muslims, mosques, and head coverings into the world of children-for-sale…

 Once in the village, motorcycle drivers are sitting on their bikes, waiting for foreign men to come and seek out young girls. These moto drivers carry the men into the back alleys…Our team member, Michael, has been coming out to Svay Pak alone on a moto to work on fixing up the gym that Agape is building that will be an outreach to the pimps and child-sellers here. He has been solicited by these men and also by little boys as he rolls into town. They come up to Michael and ask him if he “wants young girl“…Michael spent a long time with two of these little boys, as they solicited him this week. The boys are small in stature, as are all Vietnamese Cambodians, but are probably 11 or 12 years old. Their job is to go and get the young girls for the customers. They told Michael that they could get him a young girl, and asked him if he wanted two girls. Of course, Michael said, NO, but he struck up a conversation with them to find out more information about the village. The two little boys pointed out to Michael which girls are being sold every night, exactly where the lock-down brothel is, how much he would have to pay for a young girl, etc…The boys make a percentage off of each girl sold, which adds up to a few pennies in US dollars.

Loi and Lo are both coming to the brothel-turned-ministry-site, Rahab’s House, to be with us on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So are some of the girls who are being sold every night. One of them, Sokea, is maybe 13 years old. While Ruthie was telling the Bible story, Sokea begged me to sit with her, and then just crawled into my lap like a little child…my heart broke for her so I just held her, despite my ankle bones digging into the concrete floor…I was praying inside, “Lord, if she could just know positive, appropriate touch for a few minutes…”

 We teach for three solid hours with no breaks in a room that is like an oven, but the children long to be there and be with us…it is a hot but sweet refuge from their every-day lives…the thing that makes me the maddest is when the mothers come and call their girls. They will stand at the door and call their baby girl to come and have sex with a grown man as if it is nothing…It’s not, “Come, I need you to help me with chores”, or “Come, it’s time to eat dinner or do so-and-so”. It’s “Come, have sex with this grown man and then you can go back to being a kid”. Ugh. This is in the broad daylight, out in the open. I shudder to think what happens in Svay Pak when the sun goes down. People have cautioned us that Svay Pak turns even more evil around six pm. At around six pm, approximately forty girls are put on the backs of motos and taken into the brothels in Phnom Penh. Around seven pm, the men start pouring into Svay Pak to visit the brothel that is just across the street from Rahab’s House. There are an estimated 60 girls locked up in there, but we rarely get a glimpse of them as they are not allowed to come outside. We did see two of them, all dolled up and returning from an encounter with men and walking back into the brothel. We could see the shame and the hurt in their eyes and they rode past us on the back of a moto. Several years back the pimps stopped using cars and vans to transport girls as they were too easily spotted by police. Now, it’s all done by motorcycles.

 Ruthie and I wrote a curriculum for the next eight weeks. The two things we dream these children would fully understand are 1) I am uniquely and wonderfully made by God, and 2) God is uniquely and wonderfully Savior. The curriculum takes them through being created by God, God’s plan for them, God’s plan for their bodies, God’s plan to send a Savior, who Jesus is, how they can know Jesus deeply and personally…each lesson has an art activity attached to it, and so far, the children LOVE creating! They know nothing of being creative, as the ones privileged enough to have ever been in school are only taught through rote memorization. They don’t know how to think or dream for themselves, they only know how to copy the friend sitting next to them’s work…It is fun encouraging them to be unique and to be who God made them to be!

 When I am teaching and singing and running around acting out Bible characters, I have to block out the fact that the children are being raped every day and night. I try to concentrate on getting His message of Hope across. Otherwise, I think I’d just break down and cry, and load them up on a tuk tuk and kidnap them all away from Svay Pak… It’s amazing how these girls can laugh and play and sing songs to Jesus… I pray for the day when their hurt stops. I pray protection over them from torture and the heinouse crimes I have heard about that are committed against their bodies. The torture seems to be getting worse as the years go by. I pray for their hearts to not be hardened…some of them are so traumatized by the time they are rescued, that they have literally lost their minds…

 I thank God for His hope. We’d be lost here without Him. And I thank God for YOU who are reading this and have responded with prayers, and with finances. I thank you that you are not blocking this out, or running away from the horror and reality of the situation here….your prayers make a difference. Your prayers and mine are being heard by God. And God will set the captives free.

Alli Mellon

Director, the Hard Places Community and Global Storm