The Land of Smiles

Yesterday started out like any ordinary day, but as the day progressed we began to see what the "Land of Smiles" was really about. Come 9 o'clock a.m. the bars were already open and women were already being "bought" for the days activities and the evenings festivities. We spent the day in the massage parlors and "Pool bars", we would sit and order a drink and gently strike up conversation with the waitress or one of the the other girls hanging around just waiting to be bought. In most instances they would come up to you hint to you to buy them a drink just so they could sit and spend time with you-talking, laughing......smiling. How rare it is to see and feel genuine heart felt smiles from these girls. Thailand is called the Land of Smiles, but how ironic, when most often all you see is faces of desperation and loneliness, faces searching for a purpose far beyond what their life consists of now. in the evening we headed to one of the biggest areas of the "Red Light District" called "Nana Plaza." The easiest way to describe Nana Plaza is to put every image you have ever collected of nudity, provocative images, or sex from commercials or magazines or movies and roll them into one horrific, twisted nightmare. Girls on turntables, their face lifeless, half-heartedly swaying to the thumping of the music. Wearing their barely there outfits and sporting a bright yellow pin with a number on it, men oogle at the choices for the evening. Some men groping or fondling each girl as if to pick out the most tender piece of meat. These men range from early 20's through late 60's all searching for the same thing, but all coming from broken backgrounds filled with pain and despair-looking to fill that void with instant pleasure. (one thing that surprised me the most is that the average age of these men is 65, mostly looking to "buy" companionship for a week or more.)
In each of the bars, in Nana Plaza, that we visited it almost almost always started out with "No Thank You" when we offered them an invitation to the Christmas Party, but as we described the event it would always spark the attention of some girl and that just opened the flood gates-so to speak. The girls would just flock to us, eager to hear about what we had to say. It was almost flattering that some of the girls would just leave the "date" they were with to run over to us and read our invitation (written in Thai). Today we are going to return to these bars and "purchase" the ones that are willing to come to the Christmas party. Please pray that everyone of the girls that we invited would make the sacrifice (of the money that they could be making tonight) to attend this event. And if you have an extra moment check out Johanna Calfees blog http://www.calfeesinthailand.wordpress.com/ . She is an amazing writer and she so powerfully describes the atmosphere of what we saw and experienced last night.