After buying them breakfast, Isaac and Ranaldo escort me to where their day begins and ends—the alley.  But before entering , Isaac pauses to pull out a potato sack from behind the bush.  He smiles as he explains the importance of hiding your valuables.  “If this is stolen, I have  nothing to sleep in.”   I don’t think I would have considered a potato sack as anything valuable, and I definitely would not have entrusted a stranger with such precious information.

The boys take a right turn into an alley; the smell of burning trash and human feces engulf my nose before my eyes have a chance to survey their “home”.  Isaac takes me over to a corner of the alley where his friend, John, is sitting.  “Here is my friend, John.  He sleeps in the alley with us.”  John can barely lift his eyes to acknowledge me; he is too busy getting high on glue.  I wondered why Isaac was so quick to introduce me to his friend, John.  If I had a friend with an addiction or a socially unacceptable sin, I wouldn’t introduce him to a stranger.  Then again, I don’t think I am that good at befriending those with socially unacceptable behaviors…         It really does not surprise me that I have to come to Africa to be reminded of how to raise the standard of my living, but I am a little embarrassed that today’s lesson came from an 11-year–old-street boy who has never been to school.”

Four months pass, and Mary’s grows curious at the disappearance of Jackson. She saw his two brothers leave the slum, but never saw Jackson leave.  She slows down in front of his door and slowly removes the bucket from her head as she leans into the doorway.  There is Jackson, half naked and lying on the mud floor in a daze.  He had come down with tuberculosis and his brothers had abandoned him and left him to die alone. Forgetting her title as “Slut,” Mary runs and gathers the other women to help pick Jackson from the mud. The women use the money they had made from selling their beads to go and buy Jackson a bed. They lift him up onto the bed and spend the next four days tending to his medical needs.  When he is well enough to walk, they purchase him a bus ticket and send him to his home village to be cared for by his parents.

Today Mary and her friends continue to gather daily to make beaded necklaces and bracelets to finance the next need that may arise in the slum in Nairobi, Kenya.

What can you do? Pray for him and for our Silent Images team of photographers headed to Calcutta in February. Email Elizabeth at elizabeth@silentimages.org for more details.

What can you do? Pray for him and for a budding new ministry working in the slums where he continues to live. Hard Places Ministries has many challenges before them and appreciates all the prayers they can get.

I also brought my camera with me, hoping that I’ll be able to work up the guts to pull it out and snap a few of this street that saddens me deeply.

This is one of the many side streets lined with bars in this little beach town* of Thailand. It’s still early by beach-life standards—it’s only 9:30pm. Even on weeknight I’ve seen it crowded, and I hear the craziness continue late into the evening from my room.

There are a few guys around … bartenders, I assume.  Each bar has a minimum of 2 or 3 girls, all “dressed up” and ready to do what it takes to persuade any potential customer to come to their bar and not the next. The rain has certainly taken a toll on business tonight and the girls seem extra aggressive with the few people who have walked by.

One young couple begins to walk down the street, and it doesn’t take long before they realize what kind of street they’ve come to. They glance at one another, nod, and turn around to walk away.

Pretty much anything goes once you’ve entered this little street. It seems there is an unspoken rule of looking the other way when you see something you know you shouldn’t.

Eventually I muster up the courage to pull out my camera. I’ve brought a funny-lookin’ tripod contraption and I decide to use that as an ice-breaker. I ask the 3 guys and two girls around me if they’ve ever seen one like it.

The ice-breaking works.

They look at me in confusion and shake their heads no. One of the girls says in her broken English, “Oh, it’s for the camala!”

Knowing full well what she means, the guys all start to tease her. “Camala?! Ha ha. You mean camERa!” We all have a little laugh about the language differences and I am thankful that the air is clear between us. Still, knowing that all eyes are on me, I find myself wanting to quickly grab a couple shots and get outta there.

It doesn’t take long, though, before one of the girls chimes in, “You take picture o’ me!”

The lighting is hardly conducive to a decent portrait and I know that I will never be able to use the picture (for their protection).** However, I know that every girl wants to be found beautiful and if I can offer one simple little positive insight into their beauty by the appropriate use of my camera tonight, I will.

I snap the photo and show them on the screen. Their quick response is, “oooh, we so sexy!”

My heart breaks.

The smile that was on my face drops quickly into a frown and I can’t seem to help it. It’s not even really the words she’s said. It’s the way that she’s said them and the meaning that I know is behind them.

One new world-traveling friend recently said to me, “It’s just a part of life. You’ve got to accept that.”

I can’t.

I know that there’s more to life for these two girls than the struggle to be found sexy tonight by some stranger. I know that their need for me to affirm their sexiness is coming from a very twisted and skewed view of what makes them worth being around. I know that they are young girls with all kinds of potential even though the lies they’re being fed daily are drowning those hopes and dreams inside them. I know that they love to laugh at their own little silly mistakes just like I do, and that when it comes down to it, they’re not so different from me or another other girl.

I want more for them … and I refuse to accept that this is just the way that life is for them. They are not objects to be bought tonight. They are someone’s daughter … someone’s friend … someone’s sister.

So, eventually I take a few more pictures, laugh a little more with them, and then say my goodbyes.

I can’t help but wonder who they’ll become. I wonder if/how/when they might get picked up by a trafficker and where they might be taken or what they might be forced to do. I wonder what it would take to get them out of a brothel and into an aftercare program if that happened … and I wish that all my wondering was more of a far cry from the reality that could hit them at any moment.

I’ve left these two girls tonight, but I’m not sure they will ever really leave my heart, my thoughts, and my prayers.

*The name of the town will be withheld for security reasons.

**It’s far too common that we unknowingly further exploit someone in the condition they’re in by the way that we photograph and communicate through image and I take every precaution I can in this area. Also, with a location and a face, posting the images of these girls on the web opens them up to severe risk of pedifiles finding them and trafficking them.