Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Meetings in Bangkok


Today we will be departing to Chang Rai where we will serve at an orphange. Just to give you an update on what we've been doing the past couple of days in Bangkok besides filming and visiting local markets etc....

We met with four people who work at a church here called New Song. We interviewed them for a couple of hours to get their insight on the issues of human trafficking and sex tourism in Thailand. It was an absolute encouragement to meet with them and know that they shared the same ideas/ideals that we had. They were in their 20's and were all from California.

We also interviewed Ed, a volunteer worker who works with an organization in Patpong, Thailand that reaches out to prostitutes. It's pretty interesting because this ministry owns a beauty salon that serves prostitutes in the area. They serve 20-40 prostitues a day and offer them other career avenues to pursue (beauty, hair cutting, make up, nails, sewing, maids, etc). It was so encouraging and humbling to hear him speak about what they were doing in PatPong.

Later that evening we met with a business woman named Keeta, who works for a large professional company here in Bangkok. She shared some of her thoughts about the human trafficking issues in Thailand as well and was quite different than we might have suspected being a local woman.

And later on that night we were able to rig Chad with an undercover microphone and we interviewed several sex tourists in Soy Cowboy, a popular night area. Anthony and I filmed the interviews covertly from afar. We were able to get some jarring statements from these tourists.

We will continue to update more later. We will be travelling to a very poor rural village area today and spend much time there - so, we are not sure how available we will be for the internet.

We can't wait to meet these children in Chang Rai!

Oh yes, the floods here are ridiculous.

Thank you all for your support.

2 comments:

charityis said...

yo guys. make it happen!
you have our support.
scott

gw said...

saw your video today. glad you were able to hook up with the newsong bangkok ppl!