Contributor: Megan Tucker
“He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.”
Micah 6:8
I’m about to talk about sex slavery, so if you don’t want to read about how there are girls being beaten and abused right this very moment you should probably click away from the screen. I will not go into detail, and I will not be inappropriate.
But you need to know. Right this very moment, there are thousands of girls, women, boys being beaten and abused. Human beings, bought and sold like livestock, treated like property, and used until useless.
I could give you a ton of sobering statistics, like how there are roughly 27 million slaves in the world today. Or how human trafficking is the second largest criminal industry, only surpassed by the illegal drug trade, raking in $32 billion each year. Or the fact that there are about one million to 1.5 million children trafficked each year. Or that the average slave costs a whopping $90 USD.
I could share statistic after statistic, but the fact is that the numbers dehumanize the problem. There are 27 million slaves in the world, and each one is a human being, created with so much love and care in his or her mother’s womb by the God who holds the universe in His hands. And now His creation, His child, is bound in shackles and locked in dark rooms and denied any semblance of dignity.
A few years ago at a summer youth conference I learned of a place called Rapha House, located in Southeast Asia. Rapha House seeks to love, rescue, and heal girls rescued out of slavery and sexual exploitation. That summer I watched a documentary called “Baht,” and instantly fell in love with the justice being brought to lives so far away from my own. I had the blessing of going on an awareness trip to visit Rapha House and see first hand what they do, and then I was privileged enough to serve as a summer intern at the home office in Joplin, Missouri, and now I am preparing to live in Cambodia for a year interning with them on-site. I have met and held hands and danced with girls who have broken, terrible pasts, but still have so much joy.
But Rapha House is so much more than just a safe house. There is so much more to the rehabilitation that goes on at Rapha than anything I could explain to you.
There’s the welcome basket each girl receives upon arrival, and there are the three meals a day she gets; there’s the bed she sleeps on, the kitchen she learns to cook in, the courtyard she plays in, the swing set she swings on. Then there’s the house boat she receives counseling on – a literal boat floating on the water, where she can go and talk about the horrors of her short life, and then leave it there, over the water, and walk back onto solid ground. At Rapha there is the fish pond, the rice field, the mushroom hut – where the girls learn these practical life skills of sowing and reaping. At Rapha there are the classrooms where the girls go to school and learn to read and write, where they learn how to sew, and how to do hair and make-up. There is the local church down a ways where the girls can go to church on Sunday mornings if they choose to, and the evening devotionals in the courtyard that she can attend if she wants to
And my favorite part of Rapha House is the cement baptismal that sits next to the church, where so many of our Rapha girls have given their lives to Christ. Those lives given? They are such a beautiful example of the healing and forgiveness that happens at Rapha House. In my opinion, those lives are the most perfect picture, outside of Christ himself, of redemption and restoration.
That’s what Rapha House is really about: giving these girls a chance to find their true healing, true value in Christ - the one who molded them in their mothers’ wombs and carefully created her, even as He holds the universe in His hands.
If you would like to learn more about Rapha House, which I urge you to do, you can visit their website at www.freedomforgirls.org
For more information on human trafficking and to find your role in the fight for justice, visit any of the following sites:
TIP Report 2012 at http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2012/index.htm
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