I’m going to start this update with last Saturday night.

Jesus loves me.

He gave me live folk music at Cafe Eden.

Best thing ever. It definitely was feeding my soul, please excuse the cheesiness. But it’s true. Just the raw, pure harmony of a couple of guitars and 2 voices was what I needed to reboot my batteries. It was perfect.

Anyways, I found out some more info about the boys at the TransformAsia centre. Yes, they do mainly deal with girls who have been either in prostitution or were trafficked, but these boys had no where to go, so Sothea, the youth pastor at the centre, took them in.

Pierum was abandoned by his parents. He was staying in a very run down building, which floods every time it rains, with ten other families. He begged for food on the streets, was beat up by gangs several times, and gangs tried to force drugs into him several times. Pierum found TransformAsia, found Sothea, and begged to stay at the centre. Sothea had to say no because he wasn’t sure the centre could provide for him. But after getting beaten severely, Pierum found Sothea again and once again asked to stay. Sothea took him in and now Pierum has found family with the staff and the girls at the centre.

Sotan is the brother of Tina and her little sister, Jet-Yun. Their father is disabled, and their mother has left them. Their older sister supposedly works as a cook in a bar in Thailand. The family owes the bank a lot of money, so the three children were brought to the centre as a prevention. Last week, Tina left with her sister to work in Thailand to help pay off her family’s debt. Jet Yun is so little, I’m so scared for the both of them. But I have faith that God is going to work this out according to his will. Sotan was of course, heartbroken, and wanted to leave too. But Sothea convinced him to stay, and he’s now much better. He is realizing that a lot of people at the centre love him, including our team, and he’s better now.

As for Mong, his parents died and he lives with his grandmother; they live right next to the centre.

This week, God has been doing crazy things in our team. God has opened my eyes a lot. He taught me that even though I’m not working with the girls from the centre all the time, especially this week, I still need to love on people. God made us to be fishers of men, that’s what I need to embrace fully. Yes, he gave me a passion for human trafficking, He’s still doing something with that on this trip, but there are other elements of ministry that don’t deal with that. There are orphans, street kids, teaching English to random Cambodians, or whatever it may be, they are still God’s children. God planned out every single detail of this trip, he orchestrated what people I would meet, how many steps I would take through the mud, how God would move in other’s lives, everything. So just because someone hasn’t been trafficked doesn’t mean that I’m going to love them any less.

There’s more to add, but I forgot my journal where we're staying at, so I’ll add more later when I get back.