How can fresh coffee, tea, fresh fruit juice, grilled sandwiches…yummy cakes and muffins fight human trafficking? By providing formerly trafficked girls with new skills to help them find work, and by providing income that is needed to rescue children—some as young as 1 and 2 years old—from [sex traffickers].
Those words began one of our updates last year about the work of the Human Trafficking & Slavery Ministry in Mexico. Our goal is to prevent children from being trafficked into the sex and labor market, rescue those already trapped, and restore to physical, emotional and spiritual health those who’ve been abused.
The café you see here is just one front in our battle to save lives. One of the girls in the photo was rescued from sexual abuse, and after a very long, hard-fought legal and spiritual battle we also helped free her younger sister late last year. They are now thriving in an environment of love, have both given their hearts to Jesus, and are beginning to heal emotionally.
Human trafficking and slavery is a worldwide plague, but we seek to help victims and those at risk in countries, like Mexico, where traffickers prey the most, such as in:
1.) Slum communities in the Philippines, where we help keep children in school, and teach them and their parents about God’s love, which is transforming families and protecting kids;
2.) Villages in Cambodia, where we’re helping provide afterschool prevention programs for children, and in Nepal where we’re working to prevent children from being trafficked through a “goats for girls” project;
3.) Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where young women are being offered a way out of the sex industry through skills training, counseling and abundant love from staff;
4.) Pattaya, Thailand, the “sex tourism capital of the world” where our partners run a coffee shop that provides a place to minister to those few others are reaching, including former sex abusers once in a Thai prison—but now open to the gospel.
Thanks to those who generously sow into the Human Trafficking & Slavery Ministry we’ve also begun work in Myanmar and Laos. And we’re excited about the lives that will be protected, rescued and restored—and the souls that will hear about God’s love!