Armed with love and laughter, Granite Bay missionaries take on child sex trade in Cambodia

via Khmer NZ

By Stephen Magagnini
smagagnini@sacbee.com  
Published: Monday, Aug. 16, 2010 | Page 1A

BRYAN PATRICK bpatrick@sacbee.com Students crowd into a classroom to learn English at Rahab's House in Svay Pak, Cambodia. Fourteen members of Granite Bay's Bayside Church spent two weeks this summer working at a former brothel converted into a communitXXXXX xxxxxy center by a Rocklin couple. 

SVAY PAK, Cambodia – Two white vans roll up to a converted brothel at 8:30 a.m., and 14 Sacramento-area soldiers of Christ spill out to battle a barrage of physical and spiritual ailments.

They'll minister to pimps, dope peddlers and parents who seem to love alcohol and gambling more than they love their children, whose bodies are sold nightly for as little as $3 – less than the price of a bowl of grapes.

Chang Thy Mean, 24, a former child prostitute rescued by a U.S. nonprofit, now makes $70 a month as a tailor. "I felt my life had no value," she said. "I'm happy now." 

Waves of those children and their brothers, sisters and cousins inundate the missionaries with hugs, smiles and laughter. Little girls fly into their arms to be held.

"This hell hole is now a place of joy!" exclaimed Barbara Wilson, a trauma counselor leading the team from Bayside Church in Granite Bay. "Three years ago there was nothing here – now there are 150 kids."

The Bayside missionaries – teachers, computer experts, moms, a nurse and a respiratory therapist who each paid $3,500 to get here – spent 14 days this summer at Rahab's House, a former brothel named after a biblical prostitute who gave sanctuary to Israeli spies. A Rocklin couple have converted the brothel into a nonprofit community center, which now houses a free medical clinic, school, church and kids club.

"My main mission is to use love as a weapon, because none of the other methods are working," said Gilbert Acevedo, a beefy, tattooed youth pastor who pumps iron with young men – some of them pimps – at the Lord's Gym across the street from Rahab's House.

Wilson said a pimp who entered Acevedo's "Svay Pak Strong Man" contest promised not to sell girls under 18.

The slow transformation of Svay Pak from the pedophile capital of Cambodia into a fulcrum of hope was launched by Don and Bridget Brewster, who moved from Rocklin to Cambodia in 2005 to save the children after seeing a TV special on child sex slaves here.

Their nonprofit, Agape International Missions, now comprises Rahab's House, the Lord's Gym, a cafe and bakery that employs former sex workers, and the Agape Restoration Center – the initial shelter they created in Phnom Penh for 120 girls rescued from Cambodian brothels. The center has a pool, a school, a dormitory and house moms.

In 2007, the Brewsters trained their sights on Svay Pak – a slum of about 5,000 people six miles north of Phnom Penh, where girls as young as 3 are for sale.

The couple started their ministry there in a brothel that had been closed after two girls died in the "virgin room" and several others died of AIDS, Bridget Brewster said. The back door is cemented shut, and the rooms look like cells, but the building now shelters rescued teens.

A five-story brothel was under construction next door, but the Brewsters partnered with the Ratanak Foundation of Canada to convert it to Rahab's House.

"This was designed to be the best little whorehouse in Svay Pak," said Bridget Brewster, who runs Rahab's House.

Children flock to the kids club to play games with the Bayside team, make Play-Doh elephants, take guitar lessons and learn songs, computer skills, English and Bible stories.

"It's amazing how much you can do with just smiles and laughter," said Michele Dawson, one of the missionaries from Bayside.

Sex trade persists

But at night, many of the children still are sold for sex, said Don Brewster.

The sex trade has created a climate of abuse, he said. Before the Sacramento team arrived, two 12-year-old boys in Svay Pak confessed to raping a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl after watching pornography on a cell phone, the Phnom Penh Post reported. Police did not charge the boys because they are under 14, the newspaper reported.

The girl is now at Agape Restoration Center.

"Police here do not cooperate – they don't like us," said Chanta Hem, the Cambodian pastor at Rahab's House who translates for the missionaries.

Before the Brewsters and other missionaries began to shut down brothels, the pimps paid off police every morning, Hem said.

At least three of Hem's 31 disciples – Cambodian youth who volunteer 40 hours a week for Agape – were sold into prostitution by their parents. Others were raped.

A foreigner pays $300 to $3,000 for a virgin depending upon how pretty she is, Hem said.

Nearly every family in town has sold their girls, Hem said. And traffickers bring more girls bought or stolen from families in rural Vietnam.

"They love money more than the kid," he said. "For gambling, alcohol, drugs."

Cambodia has strong anti-trafficking laws. Don Brewster said he knows of 15 mothers in prison for selling their daughters. "But the traffickers don't get sent to prison, and neither do the fathers," he said.

For $10, some village leaders will change a family birth book to make a girl 16, the legal age of consent, Brewster said. In his office on the top floor of Rahab's House overlooking a field of garbage ringed with clotheslines running from corrugated shacks, Brewster produced a map indicating 11 brothels "that are holding pens for pre-pubescent girls," he said. "There's a group of us who go out and confront pedophiles."

Cambodian authorities, with the FBI and nongovernmental organizations, occasionally catch U.S. pedophiles. Five girls the Brewsters helped rescue testified in Los Angeles against Michael Pepe, a former U.S. Marine convicted in 2008 of molesting seven girls while working part time as a professor at a Cambodian university.

Cambodia is 98 percent Buddhist, and monks are often afraid to take on traffickers. Luis CdeBaca, the State Department's top official in the war on trafficking, said Christian missions are working effectively with Cambodian authorities.

He has been to Svay Pak twice. "I remember a feeling of hope," he said. "That this is not insoluble, that there are Cambodians and foreign folks who want this to change."

The efforts to transform

The strongest weapons in the Brewsters' arsenal are love and good will.

A pimp who exercised at the Lord's Gym daily said he "was raping his own 5- and 9-year-old sisters and the police were doing nothing, so we got custody," Don Brewster said. "We told him, 'We hate what you do, but we want to be your friend.'

"Then at church one Sunday, he stands up and says 'I know what I'm doing is wrong and I'm not going to do it anymore.' We got him a $50-a-month construction job, and he's doing OK."

One 100-degree day during the Bayside missionaries' visit, a cool young woman in a red pantsuit and Dalmatian-print shirt appeared at Rahab's House to design new curtains.

Chang Thy Mean, 24, a former prostitute, learned tailoring at Agape Restoration Center and now makes Hawaiian shirts that Don Brewster wears.

Mean previously sold cakes on the streets of Phnom Penh for 7,000 Cambodian riels a day – $1.65. "It wasn't enough to eat," she said. So at 15, she sold herself in Svay Pak.

A foreigner in his 50s paid $300 for her virginity. "I screamed in pain, and he stopped," she said. "The next time I prepared myself."

Mean sent about $400 home monthly, "but I don't know where the money's going." After five years Mean was rescued by International Justice Mission, a U.S. nonprofit, and sent to the Agape Restoration Center.

"I felt my life had no value. I never thought about my future," she said.

Volunteers at Agape taught her to sew – and to dream. "My dream is to be married, have two kids and have my own shop," said Mean. She is now engaged and makes $70 a month.

At the Bloom Cafe and Bakery, 20 Agape girls earn $120 a month. They recently made a sugar house for the Australian Embassy.

Girls as young as 5 are brought to Agape Restoration Center. Every two months, seven girls visit their moms in prison and take them food and shampoo. "I want to do a class on parenting and marriage," said Bridget Brewster.

Several hundred Cambodians show up daily for free medical care provided by registered nurse Allison Seay and her husband, respiratory therapist Steve Seay of the Bayside team.

"They have aches, pains, high blood pressure, really weak bones, females have vaginal issues," Allison Seay said.

They leave with vitamins, medicine and an invitation to church on Sunday.

Missionaries change, too

At the Bayside Christian team's 7 a.m. service on the roof of the Star Royal Hotel, Steve Seay prayed, "Give us the strength to do our best, and may the seeds that we plant here have a ripple effect."

The Bayside team returned home with a plaque noting their service to the people of Cambodia. The team had visited brick factories, bringing rice, face masks, sandals and candy to emaciated 13-year-olds who look 7.

"In America we're so spoiled," said Roma Moffard, the team's co-leader. "And here they're so joyful with what they have."

Wilson said, upon her return, that in the two weeks in Cambodia she formed relationships with the children and realized she could give them hope.

"It's definitely changed my perspective on what I want to do with my life," said Wilson. "My idea of retirement right now is what I can do to serve people around the world."

Her next stop: India in November.