I'm hoping to send out an update this weekend with more information about my recent trip to Eastern Europe. It's way overdue, but there's been a lot to process and to try to figure out how to distill. I did some preparation as part of a group presentation we gave at the office today about the recent trip and I thought since I already had those notes written up that I would go ahead and post them here. These aren't perfectly edited and the transitions might not all be stellar, but it should begin to give you a glimpse of some of what we experienced.
Thanks so much for your support!!
Thanks so much for your support!!
It’s 11 am on a Thursday morning, and
we’re walking through the streets by our hotel in Athens. On the corner you can see a young, twenty-something
guy walk out of a door with a half-finished frappacino and shortly thereafter
another young man walks in looking like he’s taking a morning break – messenger
bag slung over his shoulder and on his cell phone as he pushed the door
open. For all the world they look like
they’re heading in and out of a Starbucks for a mid-morning coffee run. In reality, that door they’re swinging in and
out of is a brothel. One of of over 300 legal brothels the ministry Nea Zoi has
identified in the area of Athens they’re based in.
In Bulgaria, and even in ministries I’ve
worked with in the US, it’s the women you see.
The women who have faces and are out front on the street. The sellers/pimps and the buyers/johns are
the ones in shadow – lurking in alleys, doorways and slow moving cars. In Greece, the women are locked out of sight,
but you see the men. It’s so casual, it’s
so normal, and there’s no shame. It
makes me even more scared for the women whose only interaction are with their
madam and men who’ve come to abuse their vulnerability. And it makes me even madder at these men that
now have faces. But oddly enough, with
seeing those faces also comes greater compassion and fervency of prayer for
these men who are also victims – victims of their sin and urges, victims of
their society and cultural upbringing.
In both countries, one disturbing
thing we saw is the involvement of family on both sides of the trafficking
equation. In Greece, young men are
introduced to brothels through their own fathers. Fathers frequently take their teenage sons to
the brothels to introduce them to sex. It’s a cultural tradition handed down through millennia,
tracing its roots back to the temple prostitution we read of in the Bible.
In Bulgaria, we saw how family takes an active
role in trafficking or selling women.
The most beautiful of the young Roma women are sent by their “husbands”,
the man their family gave them to, to earn money through prostitution. One of the local missionaries described being
in a Roma village one afternoon and watching as shiny freshly washed cars, one
after another and stark contrast to the dirty poverty all around, picked up the
women decked out in their “street” clothes to go work the ring road in the city.
One thing that makes this work so
hard is that the traffickers can use the same tactics across the board – abuse,
rape, sleep deprivation, drugs, withholding food, warmth, affection, or dignity
will break just about anyone’s will pretty quickly. However, the recovery process looks so very
different in each country, in each situation.
In Greece you have women from all over the world who have been
trafficked. Does someone speak their
language? Do we have materials to give
them in Czech? They’re essentially stateless, so how do they get papers to be
recognized by some country? Access to socialized
healthcare? How do you contextualize the
Gospel, dignity, and hope for women from a huge range of home countries and
heart languages?
In Bulgaria the fight looks different
because Roma women are trafficked by their own families. Their “men” send them into the cities and
have them work on the street to provide him with a new car, money to gamble,
freedom from work. “Rescuing” a Roma
woman in Bulgaria isn’t about giving support to a women alone in a foreign
place. Instead, it has to be about
convincing a women that she’s worth more than her husband, her family, her
community has been telling her for her entire life. She has to be willing to leave behind a man
she’s called husband. The community she
was raised in. And what about her
children? Will she get to keep
them?
Both these situations remind us that
as horrible as human trafficking is, in reality, it’s merely a sympton of
greater brokenness and evil. How do we
transform communities so that family relationships are valued and women are
protected instead of exploited by their own husbands? How do we influence culture and government so
that the demand for paid sex decreases?
How do we fight culture to teach our young men the value of sex and
purity? How do we challenge our
governments to make laws that protect exploited women and punish men selling
and buying women?
One thing a missionary said while we
were in Bulgaria is that it’s one thing to be called to the issue of
trafficking and it’s another to be called to working directly with the
women. Very few are actually called to
work directly with trafficked women.
Many, if not all of us, are called to the issue – whether that’s
increasing awareness, doing research, fighting for new legislation, or as pointed
out in our office staff meeting yesterday “transforming communities.” Planting churches and building communities
that value familial relationships and the dignity of women, investing in our
youth, these are all part of the work of preventing trafficking.
