Laurie Ishii

This is copied and pasted from my myspace blog… unfortunately for some reason when I post on this site the spaces all disappear and it becomes one long paragraph and I don’t know how to change that. Sorry.

Well, now that things have finally gotten back to normal for me and I am so grateful for friends who shared their overseas experiences – there were quite a few that had the same or similar kind of strange thoughts, spiritual attacks, depression, etc. as I did. I think it helped me get over it quicker. I mean – I was having CRAZY thoughts. Like – “I shouldn’t be here – I need to go back to Bangkok – I don’t belong here… ” I walked in a fog for about two weeks.Anyway, I snapped out of it. Now that I’m back, (and happy to be back) I want to share some more about my trip. More of the ministry part of it. The first night we arrived in Bangkok (we arrived there at around 2am) we went on outreach with Nightlight, a ministry to the women who work in the bars in the redlight district.The woman who started Nightlight is Annie Deiselberg – and the best way I can describe her is that she is the most humble, meek, firecracker I’ve ever met. She is amazing woman of God. She is such a soft spoken passionate woman. She literally blows my mind. Her husband is Jeff, and he took us for a tour all over the city – he’s a an amazing guy too. He took us to the Baiyoke (89 floor place where we prayed over the city and he gave us each a paper with statistics to pray over) and he took us to the temple, he took us to eat, he took us to ride on the tuk tuk (yay!) he took us on a boat (!) he took us walking everywhere, took us on the subway… and thankfully offered to carry my backpack the whole time – I brought it because I realized that most places didn’t have toilet paper (!) and of course I always have to use the bathroom everywhere all the time and so I needed to carry TP and sanitary wipes with me and didn’t bring a purse but only my passport holder strapped on my neck so…that’s why I brought the backpack. Which was killing me within the first five minutes.Okay. So. We met at Nightlight before going on outreach to set up teams and go over ‘rules’ – pretty much like we do before we do our outreaches – only we need to write our rules down and have people sign that they agree to the ‘do’s and don’ts’ rules too cause that’s a real good thing I think. Most of the rules are pretty common sense, but some people don’t always have common sense I guess. Like, “If a girl walks away from you, don’t chase after or keep trying to talk to her” – kind of a ‘duh’.Annie decided that I would go with her to a bar called Angelwitch – it was sort of “S&M” (sadomasocism) style, where the women dressed in leather, with bras made of chains. but that didn’t cover anything, if that makes sense.When we got to the Redlight district, which is really just a whole entire street – Nana Soi (Soi means Street in Thai) it’s such a trip. It actually starts much further down before that block – I mean you see women who are obviously prostitutes walking up and down the streets and children begging and it’s just really sad… but when you actually get to Nana, it’s crazy – because it’s like a big party. There’s food vendors and young girls in little school girl skirts calling out to people to come in and have a drink and guys everywhere and there are three floors of bars… lights everywhere – bright, colorful lights. It looks like “Disneyland” for sinners.Walking into Angelwitch, I felt a thick heaviness – as if we were walking through mud. I’ve felt that before! Walking into enemies territory. I felt a rush of excitement… I don’t know how to explain it, but every time I feel like we’re entering into ‘dangerous’ or ‘enemy’ territory – I don’t feel fear… I feel anticipation. It’s weird. But when it comes to stupid, irrational things like having a deadline, or doing accounting, or stuff like that – I can have panic attack – so don’t think that I don’t have fear. I’m just not afraid of people like pimps, gang members – people in general. I love people – all kinds of people, and places where people hang out – even the seediest kinds of places, places where people hang out. I’ve hung out in the best (and worst) of them! Going to Angelwitch was not too shocking to me – I used to hang out in strip bars quite often when I was using dope. The big difference to me was that in the bars here there is usually only one girl to a stage, whereas there is one long stage there with about 12-15 girls crammed on the stage together, with a bunch of poles.Some girls looked almost drugged or hypnotised, rocking back and forth to the music, while others talked to each other, and a few others danced – not very well, just sort of shaking their hips. There were a couple who actually looked like they saw the movie “Striptease” and were pole dancing too.I believe I shared this in another blog – I did talk to a couple of women and it was pretty much the same as talking to the women we talk to here… but the girls in Bangkok are more modest. They do put on the same facade… like everything is okay, if you ask them, they’ll say that they like what they do, but they aren’t as arrogant as the girls are here about it. They put on these plaster Barbie smiles – they are so fake… I tell them I used to prostitute (they open up pretty quick) I ask them who long they’ve been working, they say they aren’t going to do it very long, they’re just doing it until they have enough money, for their kids, or for their family, etc…. the same answers the girls here give us. It’s so sad.Another bar we went to another night was a bar called Lollipop – where the women dressed in bright flourescent green bathing g-string suits and everything was neon. That was more disturbing to me for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why – maybe it was because of the MamaSan (Madam) was SO pushy as we watched her wiggle around all the men and try to get a woman for each one… or maybe it was because this time these girls seemed to behave a bit more lustfully with each other – I’m not sure. But that night, the woman I was teamed up with – Beng – a Thai woman from Nightlight, had a very good conversation with a young lady and gave her one of my tracts translated into Thai with Beng’s phone number on it. Earlier that evening, before going to Lollipop – we walked and prayed on every floor of the place where the bars were. Let me try and give you a visual. When you first walk on the street, like I said, there are vendors, colorful lights, three floors of bars and people everywhere. Then you go up an escalator to the second floor, and there are girls, and “ladyboys” which are transgenders/transexuals everywhere standing outside the bars inviting you to come inside. Most of the bars you can’t see inside. Music is blasting and from what it looked to me – most of the second floor looked like ladyboys, but I could be wrong it was all kind of a blur – it was so much for the human ey
e to take in all at once. Then the third floor had more bars and even had a section where there was like a little salon for girls (and ladyboys) to do their hair with hair driers and chairs and mirrors…It was crazy – my thought was “Who in the world put up a place like that?” I mean, who made a street like that, with all the bars… and can you believe it – prostitution is actually ILLEGAL in Bangkok? Who would know it?Okay, To go on with my night at Lollipop – another thing that was disturbing there was that the girls has on numbers – where if a guy wanted to buy a girl a drink (and then wanted services from her) all he had to do was tell his waitress “Hey I want number 12″ (or whatever number he wanted) and then she would come down and sit with him. I didn’t see that the girls had numbers at Angelwitch but it didn’t matter cause it works the same way at all the bars anyway. After the drink (the girls have to sell a certain number of drinks every month) the men can buy services – time – I asked one girl how much she makes per man and she said it depends on if it’s short time or long time…As far as the age of the girls were – most looked very young (but most of us Asians all look young lol) a couple I asked how old they were and they were ten years older than I thought. The youngest I met was 17.There was another place we went called Soi Coyboy which was another crazy place because they really mixed up the ladyboys with the girls – I mean – at least at Nana they were more seperated… if a man goes to Cowboy they’d better watch out – unless they like a challenge…lol!!! We also went to another place… I forgot the name – but where the women (prostitutes) from Uzbekistan work. That was like going to a completely different country! All the men were middle eastern, and the women were all large, big boned. Beng and I sat with two women for quite some time, and had a great conversation – it was sort of weird though – we started talking about pimps and I pulled out a pimp tract, and she showed it to them and said that she loved it and was laughing and one of them looked at the writing and asked, “Is it Jesus?” and we were kind of confused cause we didn’t know what she was asking and she asked again, “Is it Jesus?” And we said, “Well yeah, it says Jesus on there” and she said, “No, we can’t have that we are Muslim.” Which is weird cause we weren’t even trying to give it to them anyway – just showing them the hundred dollar bill – at least I wasn’t…Anyway, writing this has worn me out.But I need to write about what exactly Nightlight does, because they do an amazing work – but that will take another two or three pages and another two or three hours. So that will be my next blog.