Cambodia Day 3

James loaded up Katie, Olive and I into a took-took to meet some of the women who are not yet free. As we rode along, I prayed that we’d be magnetic, and that God would make us a bright light in a dark place. James warned us that no girls would talk to three women and a man in the first bar that we went to. He was wrong.

About five minutes after we walked in, Soephogn walked up and began to talk to us. She’s 38, and has a 15-year-old son who would like to be a doctor. She’s been exploited in Cambodia since I was in the 5th grade. I tell her that I have a baby, and she asks to see a picture. James took one on his phone of Cana when we arrived, so he pulls it out. Soephogn stares at it, rubs Cana’s pixilated little face, and then kisses the screen. Other girls see that we’re having a great time at our table, and also join us. We see lots of pictures of their children, and some disturbing pictures of their “boyfriends”. Soephogn is brilliant. She speaks Cambodian, French, English and Vietnamese. She glares at the nasty American, Austrailan, and French men patronizing the bar, and gets feisty when someone takes her spot at the pool table. She hugs me tightly for the $5 I gave her at the end of the night, and runs out of the bar for a moment to wave as our took-took drives away.

At the next bar we sit in a booth and six girls quickly join us. I meet Neang, who has a daughter Cana’s age. This stops me dead in my tracks. I force my tears back as we talk about what it is like to have toddlers, the cost of formula, and how to teach them to talk. Both of our mothers watch the girls while we work. I coach her in teaching her daughter English words and beg her to read to that little girl 30 minutes a day, even if it is the same book again and again. She watches one of her coworkers leave with an overweight white man. She says, “I don’t want to do that.” I don’t want her to either. We keep tipping the girls at our table so they will not have to tend to other customers.

Three American women walk into a bar known for sex tourism. Men who are clearly there as predators feel so uncomfortable that they leave a 10 foot buffer between us and then, and many leave because they can’t stand to see us there, knowing that we know the evil they are up to. Maybe we should just bring 1,000 women to the city and camp out in all of these places. Darkness cannot push back the light.