Our time in greece has certainly been different than expected. envisions of cute fisherman's towns and Mediterranean costal life danced in my head as I prepared for greece. I've always wanted to go here, but of course my pictures in my head were that of the Santorini island life.. not so much the big city. we were warned of athens and its dangerous dirty street and westernized culture. even though I knew that, i still hoped for more. The more and more I travel though I have come to realize the darkness and mess of the world around us. We may be staying in some of the most beautiful countries, but we see and work in the darkest areas. My visions of greece soon turned into a one star hostel in the middle of the sketchiest part of athens and working on the streets till three am with prostitutes surrounded by drug addicts. its not glamorous. its not beautiful. its ugly. the world is a beautiful place, but a broken place..BUT because our God is a loving God, there is beauty among that brokeness.. there is beauty in the smile every morning from the hotel receptionist and beauty in the serving heart of the dear lady that changed our sheets every morning. There is beauty in the voice of the prostitute, singing to herself as she stand alone in the middle of the street. There is beauty in the breathe of new life I wake to every morning. If we lose sight of this beauty.. of HIS beauty, we become lost, confused, and overwhelmed at how such darkness can exist.
Since being here we have been serving with a ministry called Nea Zoi (
http://neazoi.org/) We worked 2-3 nights a week with 5 of their staff. In the short time we've been with them I've loved getting to know the hearts of the staff members, they are such wonderful people. We usually meet late at night and have a time of prayer and worship and then pack up the car with a table and water and tea and books and pamphlets and material on programs the ministry offers to the girls and stats on std's and prevention. While someone drives the car over we then walk from the outreach center down to a empty market street where the girls work. The ministry we did was with girls trafficked from Nigeria. About 60-80 girls work on this one street. The sad thing is most girls are trafficked by family members such as a distant uncle or relative. To a certain degree the girls know what they are getting into but many think they will be working in nice brothels not living and working on the streets. Others think they are coming to work in hotels as maids and such. These family members that traffic them put the girls under whats called the JuJu curse, a vudu curse. This binds them to the debt they owe their family for getting them here. It put a whole different element into the business, because most girls are raised in a christian home and know God and pray and go to church and can sing all the songs and pray to God every night for safety and to get them out but yet they believe in the power of the curse over the power of God. They are afraid to leave because of the curse. They wont leave or go home until they can pay back all the money owed..which can take a very very long time because they must also pay rent which the family member make really high and impossible. Because of the way the Greek economy is right now theres very few customers and the girls aren't able to make the money to pay the debt back so it takes longer and longer. Its so hard because when you speak with the girls and ask if they want help leaving and want to go back home and get out of this lifestyle they say "yes, but I cant, the curse, I can't leave because of the curse." :( its so sad because God's love and freedom is so much bigger than this stronghold of a curse on them.
The first night we went I was unsure what to expect. It was scary walking the streets at that hour to get to the street we would be working on. There were drug addicts everywhere, the smell of urine lingering in the air, the streets lined with needles. The very first night we came across a man laying on the ground with a gash in his head and blood pouring out the side as if he has just been beaten. The staff called the police while we hurried inside for our prayer worship time. After, on our way back out to the street we'd be working on I was hit with a wave of heaviness from past experiences in the Philippines. am I ready to do this again? can I handle it? I felt unsure of what street prostitution here would look like. The first two nights was more a time of shadowing the ministry, learning how they run things and starting to get to know the girls faces and names. By the third time we went out we had specific people on our hearts. The third night I went out felt different down there..felt extra heavy. There was a lot of sexual activity happening in nearby alleys and I felt useless to the darkness around me. Heres a part I wrote in my journal that night..
…it was such an ugly thing it looked so ugly so wrong, turning something meant to so beautiful into something so ugly and dirty, some thing wasted in a market alley corner. what provoked the guy? what is the void in his life? then two girls led a man right in front of us up the hill into the bushes and behind us a girl hopped off the back of a bike of a guy she had just serviced. no shame. it was so in the open tonight. we decided we need to pray. I feel we haven't had breakthrough yet. when is it coming Lord? what must we do? pray harder? talk deeper. I feel sometime I don't feel the lords presence. tonight his light shone, even if it only felt small. we began to pray, I was overwhelmed by the lord saying "I AM THE LIGHT.. 100% light.. in my light there is NO darkness. no fear. because my spirit is in you I will not let this darkness enter you. I prayed for his light to stream down that alley so the darkness would flee…
God placed a song on my heart that night and I then played it on repeat till our next night of ministry :) Its called "Light up the Darkness" by The Bridge Band. Going into our next night of ministry, our fourth night, I felt completely different. I could tell God was at work and that this night we'd see some awesome things. I had such energy and joy and zero tiredness. As a small group of us walked the streets there was such a connection with the girls. They were engaging and starting conversations and asking questions an opening up. We were laughing and joking around, we had awesome times praying over some of the girls, and sharing hearts. We were able to talk to more of them in-depth about their futures and desires and want for getting out of prostitution. We shared about all the classes and help Nea Zoi can offer to them. Usually there are mostly cars driving by scanning and "shopping" over the girls but this particular night there was a whole lot more creepy men on foot. They would hover around as we prayed and just make comments and be distracting and creepy towards us. It was totally satan trying even harder to scare us away but I felt NO fear towards these men and we all would just look at each other and smile saying, bring it on satan, we have the God of light and life on our side :) The shift in the difference of the two nights was such an incredible testimony of God's faithfulness to us and love for our spirits of innocence he protected us time and time again as we walked those dark streets among the addicts and thief's late every night, seeing violence, attempted muggings, lustful eyes, and loneliness, and people held strong by the temporary fix of a drug. My heart went out time and time again to the people we passed and I knew God's heart was doing the same thing. On our fifth and last night of ministry I got to sit and talk with a girl (I'll call her "Josie") she was dressed in more normal clothes, not the skimpy one like the others. You could tell she was over it, over her job, over the streets. We talked about life and love and what she wanted in a perfect man, her dream guy :) I shared with her how God is the perfect boyfriend. He pursues us despite our faults, despite the choices we've made. In talking with her I could tell how much she's blamed herself for her life. She knew she was getting into prostitution but though it would only be for a few months until she paid off the debt to her family. Because they raise the amount so high and out of reach she has been here now for 3 years. She feel bound to it now because she choose it. She said it feels wrong in her spirit to be working on the streets, But she referenced in the bible how we are to keep our covenants and there are consequences to the decisions. Its different than if she had been tricked. But she choose it. We explained how time and time again we all choose wrongly. Thats where God has grace with us. He doesn't want us in a situation that is hurting us, his creation, he cares about our bodies, about us. Though there was no immediate changes that night I pray that we were able to stir us thoughts and getting her thinking more about God's desires for her life. Another girl I had gotten close to ("Nessa") seemed off this night, the previous night she was full and we were laughing together and then on our last night she just seemed sad. She came up to our table to grab a cup of ice tea when I first noticed her change in demeanor, late I noticed her sitting by herself down on the street corner. One of the staff guys stood down there to bodyguard while I sat down and talked with her. She told me how her mom back in Africa is not doing well and she had to send some money. I prayed with her for her mom and talking to the staff later we discussed how sometimes the families back in Africa will call saying they are sick and need money but really they just want the money.. this then cuts into the debt the girls are trying to pay off under this JuJu curse which makes them have to stay even longer. As we learned while we were in S. Africa, family is huge. You support and take care of each other. You don't go back on your word. "Nessa" is so precious to me and she said over and over how she will miss us. It was hard to hug goodbye and watch her walk down the street towards the other girls and a potential customer knowing that she is still going to be on these streets night after night even after we're out of the country. This next month Nea Zoi is on vacation and then they will start Nigerian Outreaches again in the fall. Please pray for these girls during this month off that they will really take to heart what was said and that God will really speak to them over the weeks, that went outreaches come again it may be there time to finally leave the streets. Pray for a breaking of this curse, pray for provisions financially and different jobs for them, and pray for safety and health over these precious girls. There was a scrabble between two of the girls the one night, we don't know what happened but when we came across them there was a man with blood all over him and two very fired up prostitutes. The one girl *Tia was arrested and the other *GeGe, who had allegedly tried to stay out of everything, was starting to get ganging up on by the other girls because she possibly didn't stand up for *Tia, the next night we talked to GeGe and she had what looked like a bite mark on her. She opened up saying "I just try and keep out of everything and keep to myself, i'm quite but i'm not dumb, I don't want friends because they will just turn on me." She has opened up like this to anyone and felt bad for what she may have been through the previous night. The streets are dangerous, they are ugly, and these girls need our thoughts and prayers.. they need freedom.
(Names have been changed but here are girls close to my heart: Fia (Fia had the brightest and most beautiful smile, you don't see it often, its rare moments that it creeps out, she works hard because she need the money to survive, the look on her face tells of the pain and sadness of what she must do, not want she wants to do) , Josie, Nessa, Hope (says in her free time she like to sit and process in her house and meditate, i'm praying that it in those time the Lord really speaks to her the most), Tia, GeGe
(photos were not taken while on the streets and specific details about time and dates of ministry are not able to be released out of respect for the ministries policies)
