The Bars

I truly learned what it felt like when people said their hearts were broken. I had never in my life felt so distraught emotionally for people I didn’t even know until the heartbreak was so manifest physically in the van ride back from the bars. Without even comprehending why, I felt a lump form in my throat and suddenly, I was crying.

I cried for the girls I had met that day. Most of them were mothers. Some of them were even grandmothers, but many of them could have been me. They were eighteen and nineteen and in their twenties. They had come from surrounding countries from families of ten and various regions in Guatemala with children of their own. They wore an excess of makeup to betray their age, and tight clothes that gave away their profession. They wore flashy jewelry: rings on every finger and hoops in their ears. High heels and beaten dispositions. And despite their varying backgrounds, they all shared commonality in the fact they were made objects at night. They were prostitutes. To be used on a lustful notion. Thrown away, and discarded by society. With no regard to feelings and the deep, nameless innermost entity that constitutes a person’s soul.

Therefore, many of them had been hardened internally in their youth. They were changed the way only those who have suffered years of hardships are, the type that completely alters one’s countenance. And while some sat in the deceit of their own lies, content with their job, and others stood quietly, ashamed and aware of the nature of their livelihood, I realized there was hope.

Our team visited five or six bars that day, but my heart didn’t break for all the hope and the light potential until the last bar.

It was smaller, but it appeared well-known as there were about seven girls working there. The atmosphere was overwhelming and stiflingly congruent with prevalent theme of darkness. The brick enclosure made it easy to obstruct from the physical absence of light from the outside, but it was more than just that. It was the shadows of degradation and enslavement lurking around the corners and in the backrooms—the places we could not go. I could see this darkness pass over the faces of the girls who worked there, and especially the girl sitting across from me.

The women had offered us seats and we pulled up chairs together in a kind of rough circle. But this one girl, glaring at the ground at my feet, resigned to give me minimal, one-word answers to all my questions, she was the one that offered me hope. While I never found out her name, I learned she had come from another area of Guatemala to here, in Puerto Barrios, searching for work. She was twenty-six and a mother of two living back home, five and seven years-old.

And as we were getting ready to leave, I asked if I could pray for this woman and the two others standing near to her. They nodded their consignment and halfway through my prayer, which was in English, this woman broke down and silently sobbed in front of me. All because someone was only offering her the motion of prayer; the idea that someone cared for her and loved her and not for what she could do.

It was not in God’s plan for me to see the fruits of labor harvested in continuing to converse with the hopeful, eighteen year-old prostitute who had agreed to come to church with our group on Sunday. Instead, I made a meager attempt to staunch the sobbing of a cynical woman accustomed to being used.  Still, I was overcome with the thought that this woman was crying because she wasn’t going to stay in acceptance with her lifestyle and her nightly occupation. That’s what I prayed for, at least. After two or three minutes of feeble consolation and patting her back, I gave way to the same emotions this woman was feeling, although maybe for different reasons.

It was not even of my own volition, or thought-provoked, but I was crying because I was filled with the necessity to let every woman who worked at a bar and every individual who filled them, that my God is a god of mercy and compassion for his people. I wanted to tell them, right there, in that moment, that He is a place in which you can take refuge.

I realized I was crying because of what one teammate had phrased so accurately in saying that we were the ones to take on the emotions and attacks these girls suffered daily, even if it was for fifteen minutes. It was an emotional burden no one should have to bear.

Finally, I was crying because the strongest sense of sisterhood had come over me. The girls who came into these places for work were my sisters, and I felt the terror they must have to become objectified, day in and day out, by a stranger. I felt the sorrow I would have for my own sister being subjected to the raw end of the pangs of humanity. After all, these were all children of God.

“Some sat in darkness and the deepest gloom,
Prisoners suffering in iron chains…they stumbled, and there was no one to help.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble and he saved them from their distress.
He brought them out of the darkness and the deepest gloom and broke away their chains.”
–Psalm 106:10-14