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I just returned from Thailand, and I don’t quite know how to communicate how I’m feeling.  There is a melancholy that accompanies the great suffering of so many women here as well as a bright hope that lives with those who’ve survived or never endured at all.

I’ve made this video for all of you, which I hope captures both the hope and love as well as the pain that many girls in Thailand live with every day.  This is a difficult story to tell.  This is a difficult place to live.  

The young girl in the video with me is Bebe.  She represents the collision of the two worlds I’ve seen here.  She is a girl who lives among those who have suffered, yet she herself has not because her parents can afford education.  Bebe represents everything bright and promising about Thailand and why what The SOLD Project & Home of New Beginnings are doing is so important. (and she’s stolen my heart.)

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Have I made a mistake? Have I promised more than I can deliver?

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This afternoon we visited the VCDF drop-in center–one of SOLD’s partner organizations. VCDF works with street children in Chiang Mai. Some as young as 4-years-old and some as old as 15 collect here en masse during the day to find a sense of structure as the volunteers and staff pour over them with love and education. Though many are alone in life, here they have family. Here they are normal.

In the States, half of the children I saw today are too young for Kindergarten. Too young to ride in a car without a car seat. Too young to play in the backyard without supervision. Yet, here they are live on the street amongst drugs, prostitution, and pedophiles.

Our arrival at VCDF today interrupted art therapy class for the 5- to 8-year-olds. In a semicircle around the teacher 20 children–mostly boys–sat holding a drawing of how they felt inside. Lemon yellow suns. Ocean blue houses. Turtle green people. Each child would show the group his creation, explain what it meant, then the entire group would applaud. Imagine Celebrate Recovery with 5-year-olds.

One boy, the smaller one was next. I stood at the edge of the semi-circle watching over his shoulder as he explained his drawing to the group in his tiny Thai voice. My eyes watered as he spoke to the group pointing to the large stick figure next to the small stick figure. They both held what looked like to me red cucumbers in their hand, and he only spoke a few sentences–a blur of tiny words really, that were delivered as matters of fact. “Yum yum” was the only word I understood. He was talking about oral sex. Then he finished speaking as the other children clapped. He clutched his drawing with a smile.

Tears now falling, I had to leave. On my way out, I noticed that many pictures make it up on the walls as a reminder that these children are not alone. Though the world outside is insidiously abusive, here they have a family. Here they are safe. Here they may know love.

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I was driving home and processing how I was feeling now that I’ve been in Thailand almost two weeks. As expected, I’m in somewhat of an emotional disarray–which is partly why I came. There is such wonderful and terrifying entropy when I remove the comfort of my own routines and let disorder begin to break me down. These last few days feelings of loneliness have found their way into the loose construction of my re-fabricated heart like curious insects. I’m thankful for God’s grace, but stunned silent by how debilitating these feelings of loneliness can be. But I can’t concentrate on that for long because he’s yelling again.

“Falang! Falang!” I turned my head to see him waving fervently at me from the passenger side through the windshield, and I laugh because falang means foreigner in the northern Thai dialect. He’s wearing no seatbelt and a smile that shows every poorly brushed tooth in his mouth. Traffic is chaotically dense, and though I can’t really afford the extra seconds to look, I stare because I’m intrigued both by his courage and curiosity. I decide to engage in the moment.

I swerve to the side of the lane–to his side of the car–and slow down. It’s a tight fit as parked cars whiz by on one side and he beams with excitement from his brother’s car on the other. He gives me time to manage the relationship between the vehicles and as soon as I have my bearings and look at him, he begins.

“What is your name,” he asks rather loudly.
“Maikhoen. Khun chêu a-rai” I respond. He doesn’t understand, or can’t hear me, so I try speaking louder and in English while looking back and forth between him and the traffic. “Michael. What is your name?”
He grows very excited at our new friendship, and repostures himself on his knees with this elbows on the door. And I too find that I am rather excited about this sporadic collision of fate.
“Jaidee,” he responds with remarkably clean English. “How are you?”

A smile as happy as his own comes across my face now, and I’m stunned silent once again. Only this time at how wonderfully healing this simple question is–a question from a brave child who wants to show off his English with an American. And all at once I realize that God is using the innocence and bravery of a Thai child to address the lurking woundedness in my heart. In this moment, driving through a foreign city sardined between cars while loneliness ruminates, I needed to know that someone cared about me. I needed to know that someone wanted to know how I was feeling.

Traffic sludges on and I must re-enter the lane, but before I motor ahead, we exchange smiles because we are both at the end of our language capacity, and I answer with as much sincerity as I can muster.

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Don’t even think about
Exploiting children or women
Michael Manes kicks
Your ass for a living

Thailand is foreign
And stuff
So there are probably scary things like dragons and weird food
That’s rough

But he steps in confidence
He’s not scared
He eats a decent breakfast
He’s mostly prepared

So look out evil doers
There’s no room in this town
Errr city? Province?
I may be politically challenged
but you’re still goin down.

And don’t think
That you can flee
To neighboring
Asian countries

He’s going there too
I mean, if he can
He might have previously committed to other engagements that prevent him from doing so.

But if not,
Look out
He’ll punch your face
No doubt

*and probably also do some other constructive, nonviolent, altruistic things for the vulnerable and defenseless

Amen

I am still very much in transition but already feel my brokenness begin to surface in the freedom that being a foreigner provides. “I have changed so much over the last few years,” I wrote this morning. “I’m different in the way I trust people or take risks.” I was remembering a time when I used to trust people with my heart without fear. I’d share of my dreams–talk of my pain–but I realized those days are long gone. “I still feel tender inside. Very ripe.”

Learning to trust people after being wounded takes great effort. It is not a passive healing, but rather a very active healing. Up the tree we must climb, though we are still broken, only to hang from the branch and let go. As we did before our pain. And eventually, after much effort, we find our rhythm again.

Courage. For us all.

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Hope. For us all.

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Peace. For us all.

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