AsiaStories

Ajanta Gupta* had nowhere to turn. A widow in her early 20s with HIV, two small children and no job, Ajanta was desperate.

A friend introduced her to prostitution as a quick way to earn cash.

Gupta didn’t see any other option and knew she had to do it for her children. She couldn’t let them starve.

So, one year after her husband died of AIDS, Ajanta joined the ranks of India’s “fly prostitutes” — middle-class housewives and students who sell their bodies to earn money to feed their children and pay the rent. Due to their existing economic problems and lack of alternatives, they feel there is no other option.

The Indian Ministry of Labor and Employment reported that a woman’s daily wage for unskilled labor averages $1.25 — three-fourths of a man’s wage for equivalent work. As a result, it is difficult for women to find jobs that can support an entire family. In Ajanta’s case, her illness complicated matters even more.

“I need money to run my family, and the money I was able to earn was not sufficient,” Gupta explained. “Also, because I am sick, I am unable to work properly. So I had to go through with that work (prostitution).”

Gupta’s friend, Laghuri Kapoor,* helps women enter this profession daily. She’s another fly prostitute in Gupta’s city and has seen an increase in the number of housewives entering prostitution in the last couple of years. She believes this is primarily for economic reasons.

“NO ONE COMES HAPPILY”

Kapoor makes it her job to connect women with customers. While some might call her a pimp, she does not describe herself that way. Instead, she explains how she cares for the women when they are sick and provides training to help them avoid AIDS. She recognizes that most women enter prostitution out of desperation.

“No one comes into this profession happily,” Kapoor says.

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Darpana Rana,* whose husband left her with three children, agrees. Rana explains that insufficient income or “bad” husbands — those with a second family, an addiction or an abusive nature — are some of the reasons women “slowly, slowly, get involved in the profession.”

Even when legitimate work is available, oppression and abuse at home can leave women feeling worthless and unloved and cause them to turn back to their old ways. Yamini Chopra* left prostitution when she found work with a non-profit organization but returned when her husband continued beating and abusing her. He constantly tells her that she is worthless and bad.

“Since he is convinced I am bad,” Chopra says, describing her husband as a drunkard. “I decided to be bad!”

As a result of his insults and at the encouragement of her family, Chopra returned to prostitution a few years ago.

“My family told me that since my husband was going to abuse me whether I was a prostitute or not, I might as well make more money as a prostitute,” Chopra says.

Though their circumstances have hardened them, the same difficulties that drove these women to prostitution — loneliness, hunger, poverty and desperation — are also drawing them to the Gospel. In the last few months, four women prayed to receive Christ.

Gupta was the first.

GUPTA’S STORY

Seven months ago, Indian pastors Rabindra Bhat* and Aashank Malik* visited Gupta. Bhat worked with Gupta before her husband died. He thought Gupta could help him understand how best to minister to HIV patients since her husband died of AIDS. During the visit, Gupta confessed her involvement in prostitution.

Bhat shared the Gospel with Gupta, and a small group of believers began meeting regularly in Gupta’s home. Gupta’s mother, Mahdu,* and her sister, Gargi,* also attended the meetings. Within a few weeks, both Gupta and Mahdu prayed to receive Christ.

“Before where I worked, some of them used to pray to Jesus. In my heart, I liked Jesus, but I never had much information,” Gupta explains. “Then, these two brothers came and talked with me more and I decided to accept Jesus as my Savior.”

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A few weeks later, Bhat baptized Gupta and Mahdu. The small group of believers celebrated with communion at Gupta’s home. Even during the celebration, customers came calling, looking to buy Gupta’s body. She turned them away.

Today, Gupta has a job as a teacher’s assistant at a small preschool. A local church supplements her salary. She and the group of believers continue to meet weekly in her home. Recently, she allowed a team of American volunteers to host a medical clinic in her yard. Along with her neighbors, Gupta invited her friends who are involved in prostitution. At the clinic, two women prayed to receive Christ — a 19-year-old neighbor and a 20-something prostitute.

Though Gupta admits some friends are angry with her for leaving prostitution, she unashamedly tells them her story and urges them to follow her God. Most remain unconvinced.

UNCONVINCED

“Any god will help us if we are fully devoted to him,” Rana says bluntly. “The Hindu god, the Muslim god, they are all the same.”

Rana explains that when customers call she drops what she is doing and runs to them. She likens this to God’s relationship to mankind.

“Of course, God will run to us if we are devoted to Him,” Rana says. “But our minds are not devoted to God. We are only thinking about our needs. When [my income] is sufficient, then I will think about God.”

In spite of their doubts, however, the women want to hear more. The group meets monthly to discuss Gupta’s God and ways out of prostitution. At one of the meetings, her friend Kapoor surprised everyone and prayed to receive Christ.

Gupta keeps inviting everyone to hear because she wants them to know about the happiness she has found in Jesus Christ.

“I am so happy … openly I have declared that I love Jesus,” Gupta says. “Now everybody knows that I love Jesus and I am so happy about that.”

*Name changed.

The smell of okra cooking wafted out to the streets, greeting the colorfully dressed women and children streaming into Ajunta Gupta’s* backyard for the free medical clinic.

Fresh cut flowers decorated the pharmacy table in one corner. Woven mats and plastic chairs covered the rest of the dirt floor/yard. Prostitutes and curious neighbors sat in any available space and stared at three American nurses visiting their Indian slum.

Unfazed by the chaos of children running, introductions and moving chairs, Dora Sidgewick* grabbed a blood pressure cuff and started doing what nurses do — gathering vital signs and evaluating patients.

“This will give us something to do so that they’re not just staring at us,” Sidgewick, an 11-time medical mission trip veteran, said with a determined smile.

Sidgewick, Alice Demsky and Sienna Mortenson spent a week loving women and children affected by prostitution in India by providing some free, basic health care that most in this crowd could not afford otherwise.

Gupta,* a new believer and former fly prostitute, opened her home to friends in prostitution. She hoped the free medical care would give them an opportunity to hear about Jesus. Most of her friends still work in her former profession. A fly prostitute doesn’t live in the brothels and often looks like any other woman. Most of the prostitutes are housewives or single parents who are just trying to find a way to feed their children.

The volunteers wanted to see these prostitutes as Jesus sees them.

“Jesus did not hang out with the Christians. He hung out with the sinners and went to where they were and that is what we have to do: Go to where the people are that don’t know Christ,” Sidgewick, a labor and delivery nurse and member of First Baptist Church, Monticello, Ark., said.

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As the women sat in the backyard waiting their turn with the nurses, a local pastor shared about the purpose of life. He said that they should believe in Jesus because only Jesus sacrificed Himself for our sins. Sidgewick wasn’t about to let a chance to share her own story pass.

“Before they could pray, I interrupted him because I wanted them to know why we were praying,” Sidgewick said. “So, that was when I shared where we were from, why we were there and basically gave a short testimony about my life in Christ, how I came to know Christ and the difference He had made in my life.”

Mortenson didn’t miss a beat and added her story to the mix. It was the opportunity she had been waiting for. Through an interpreter, the nurse educator from First Baptist Church, Norfolk, Va. shared the Gospel with two ladies who now believe in Jesus.

“My prayer before the trip was for God to prepare their hearts for the Gospel and that is what He did,” Mortonsen said.

While the nurses were only providing basic general exams, their goal was to share the love of Jesus with everyone they touched.

“We have not done fancy things like surgeries or curing illnesses, but we have touched people and each time that I would listen to someone’s heart or listen to their lungs or touch their neck I would ask God to bless this person and think about what a difference it would make if Jesus was in their lives,” Demsky, Hillmon Grove Baptist Church, Cameron, N.C, said.

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Whether their patients were fly prostitutes, slum children or children of prostitutes, the nurses cared for everyone that showed up.

“God makes us perfect,” Mortenson tells a young girl with deformed arms and legs. “You are perfectly made!”

Sidgewick, who has participated in medical clinics in eight different countries, said that no matter where she goes, people are the same.

“The greatest need I can see is the need for Jesus Christ,” Sidgewick said. “There are always people who need Jesus everywhere you go.”

Mortenson agrees and likens the church to a hospital in meeting this need.

“Who needs the hospital more than those that are broken or broken-hearted? We can’t just give them a band-aid, though,” Mortenson said. “We have to fix the heart and only Jesus can do that.”

*Name changed

Bonnie Swenson* is a 32-year-old mother from Inola, Okla., a small town of just over 1,500 near Tulsa. Pregnant with her third child, the blonde, petite woman stands a little over 5-feet tall — in stark contrast to the larger, dark-skinned women with whom she works.

Bonnie’s “office” is the red-light district of northeast India. Brothels, housed behind a concrete wall along the city’s four-lane highway, are tucked into a web of intricate passageways and dark alleys. Pimps and their prostitutes stand on bridges crossing the open sewer connecting this “other world” to life on the outside. They are suspicious of everyone — especially those who seem out of place.

When Bonnie walks into the brothels seeking to share the love of Jesus with the city’s prostitutes, people notice.

“It’s very difficult because I’m a foreigner … you are questioned by men and women,” she said, noting that local officials often hear about her visits.

The concrete wall is but one barrier that separates the 900 women and 150 children living in this part of India from the outside world. Human rights advocates estimate that as many as 80 percent are human trafficking victims whose captors subject them to torture, rape and starvation to break their will. Few, if any, are here by choice.

“There are women all over this country in situations like this,” Bonnie said, her voice rising with emotion. “I’m just doing my dishes, taking care of my sweet little kids, and women are being caged, drugged … God said, ‘YOU have to care.’”

A modern-day form of slavery, human trafficking is the illegal trade of people —especially women and children — for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor.

REACHING THE FORGOTTEN

After watching the movie, Taken, which focuses on the abduction and trafficking of two young women, Bonnie became passionate about helping India’s victims. Bonnie couldn’t sleep after watching the film, knowing that the city she lives in is an entry point for traffickers from Nepal, Bangladesh and China.

Bonnie began praying in 2010 about the role she could play in bringing an end to the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world — one the U.S. State Department identifies as second only to the illegal arms trade. Undeterred by the enormity of the problem, Bonnie asked God, “How do I do it?”

“I DON’T HAVE A NAME”

One of the first people she asked for help was an Indian woman named Waheeda Kakkar.* Kakkar runs a hostel for girls whose mothers live in the brothels. Though Bonnie simply wanted information, Kakkar discouraged her from getting involved.

“Waheeda told me if I wanted to go with her into the brothels, she would say ‘no,’” Bonnie recalled. “She said, ‘I’ve worked with plenty of Americans. Americans get excited about many things in the beginning, but a few months go by and they don’t care about it at all.’”

Through patience, prayer and diligence, Bonnie eventually convinced Kakkar that she understood the long-term nature of the ministry. But she soon discovered that gaining access and establishing trust was going to be tough in the brothels.

“You see the women’s faces. Their faces are hard,” Bonnie said. “They don’t smile a whole lot. I asked a woman her name and she said, ‘I don’t have a name.’”

DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS

Bonnie continued to pursue several avenues to build relationships with the women inside. Toward the end of 2010, she and local partners offered a medical clinic inside the brothels in cooperation with a local AIDS organization. More recently, a team of American volunteers offered basic medical care to women and children in the red-light district.

But trying to rescue victims from this lifestyle can be risky.

Because of prostitution’s lucrative commercial value — the United Nations values the human trafficking industry at $32 billion per year — traffickers and pimps do not look kindly on those who encourage their “product” to leave the business. In many countries, links to organized crime and official corruption result in threats to the physical safety of activists.

If Bonnie, who visits the brothels about every other week, is afraid she doesn’t show it. She shrugs off questions about the danger of her work with a smirk and a twist of her head.

“I’ve never felt in danger,” she said. “I’m always with my local partners. I never feel threatened … but if there happened to be some danger, would I still keep going? I guess so. If God called me to do it, I would find a way.”

SHE CAN’T LOOK AWAY

Danger or not, Bonnie’s husband, Evert,* recognizes that nothing will deter his wife from this work.

“That’s Bonnie,” he said with a smile. “If there’s a brick wall that needs to be knocked down, she will run right at it. When she saw the enormity of what’s going on with prostitution here, she just couldn’t look away.”

Though Bonnie admits to uncertainties, her grief for these women and her desire to be obedient to God’s call compel her to move forward.

“We’ve shed plenty of tears over this,” she said. “But I know that God is opening up these doors — that slowly it’s going to happen. We just have to keep praying.”

*Name changed

When Suh Hasan,* an Indonesian Christian, pops her wild cloud of hair into Tri Hartoyo’s* doorway, the lines on Tri’s 40-year-old face disappear, and she enthusiastically throws her thin arms around her friend.

Hartoyo pulls Hasan into her house, chatting the entire time as they settle onto a couple of overused couches with patches of upholstery missing. Hasan doesn’t seem to notice the large smudges of dirt staining the walls or what lies behind the curtain dividing this room from the smaller ones rented out to women.

In fact, when Hasan entered the house, she didn’t even blink an eye at the red, government-issued sign by the front door identifying Hartoyo’s home as a brothel in Indonesia.

She’s been visiting Hartoyo once a week for the past year to tell her more about Jesus, and the red light environment doesn’t phase her.

Money or God

To show Christ’s love to Hartoyo and other women like her, Hasan and four other Indonesian Christian women devote every Thursday to traversing the prostitution district in a mid-sized city on the island of Java. They enter the brothels during the day, when prostitutes appear as nothing more than women in faded makeup. Here, they meet Hartoyo and others like her to talk about heaven, even though the message seldom penetrates the encompassing world of sexual retail.

“We evangelize. We share. We hope they will believe in Jesus Christ,” Hasan says. “If they don’t want to, we just encourage them to leave the job.”

Despite Hasan’s gentle nudges, Hartoyo doesn’t show interest in leaving this lifestyle anytime soon. Her brothel sits, squeezed into a line of run-down houses, seven hours from her family’s village. Eleven years ago, she left her family to travel with a woman who promised her a housekeeping job in the city. Instead, she found herself dropped off at the very same brothel where Hasan now svisits her. She had no money and no alternatives.

Since then, she has traded her body for rupiah, the Indonesian currency, hoping to scrape together enough money to move back home with her aging mother and two sisters. At age 31, she acquired enough to rent the brothel herself and rent the rooms to other prostitutes. Essentially, for the past nine years, she’s worked as a madam.

“The most important thing right now is that I’m getting a lot of money,” Hartoyo says. “I want to go home and live with my family.”

Hartoyo utters these words in her living room, the very same room someone brought her to 20 years ago to discover her horrific new life. Now, deep lines etched from two decades of dogged survival crease her face, making her look at least 10 years older.

To Stay or Leave?

Hasan and Hartoyo talk easily back-and-forth as only friends can. A year ago, Hasan began talking to her friend about Jesus and His love for her. She spoke of His grace and His mercy and His ability to forgive any sin Hartoyo could possibly commit. Shortly after initially hearing the Gospel, the prostitute prayed and asked Jesus to take away her guilt and sins.

Months later, Hartoyo still runs the brothel.

“I realize that [this is not godly],” Hartoyo says, “but the most important thing for me is that I get enough money and go home.”

Hasan smiles sadly at the thin, worn prostitute beside her. Hasan, with her frizzy black hair and hearty laugh, has walked through the red-light district for the past 11 years. She says the prostitutes’ desire for money often obscures Christ’s calling. When she asks them for prayer requests, they frequently ask Hasan to pray that God will send more men to their rooms. She estimates that only 20 to 25 women have accepted Christ and left the business since she began visiting the district.

“The Holy Spirit keeps talking, telling me that I must go, even if it’s difficult sometimes,” she says.

Grief or Celebration

Hasan battles discouragement, but God has pressed important lessons on her heart — lessons that help her withstand disappointment when prostitutes like Hartoyo express interest in the Lord without understanding the call to follow Him.

“(God taught me) about love — love for others and love for the women,” Hasan says. “They cannot live without Jesus. We really want to tell them that Jesus is love and hope that they can have a better life and leave that place.”

Hasan celebrates the women who left the dirty houses and the emotional desolation of the red-light district. She grieves for Hartoyo, whose longing for home binds her to the brothel’s grimy rooms. Hasan’s work suspends her between these two emotions as she faces the reality that not everyone who professes Christ’s name will grow in their knowledge of Him.

Pray for Hasan as the Holy Spirit compels her to continue walking through the red light district, ministering to broken women who refuse to vacate their brothels.

*Name changed