Wrapping up

So we are now back at home and I wanted to post one last blog. Thank you all for your prayers as we set out of this journey. Continue to pray for those at PRC as they continue theirs amazing work in Nepal. There are so many stories to tell so I leave you with this one.
This is the story of Didi(Didi means sister in Nepal. I use this name to protect those that have been rescued.)
One Day a beggar woman that lived in a temple was going down to the river to relieve herself when she saw in the distance a man throwing a sac into the river. He noticed her and ran away. She thought he may have stolen something and so she began to walk over to investigate. The dogs beat her there and were dragging the bag and trying to open it. She arrived and scared them off. Slowly she open the bag to find a small baby only a few days old. She gathered the baby up and took her back to the temple where she lived and begged for money to survive. She cared for this child for 9 years until she died.
A woman from a church heard about the child and contacted Shanta to ask her if she would take the child in. Shanta of course said yes. Sadly the day that the beggar woman died the guru's at the temple raped the girl. Shanta went the next day to see the little girl and asked her if she would like to come with her. She said yes and PRC would become her home and family where she would be educated, find healing and love.
Fast forward many years. Didi had many offers to marry as she grew to be a beautiful young woman but she turned them all down. One day a man came to ask her if she would marry him he had been stricken with tuberculosis of the spine as a child which left him very disabled. To everyone's surprise she said yes. Shanta asked her why she would choose to marry this man and this was her reply. Mommy if I do not marry him who will. You took me in when no one else would and showed me love.Jesus sacrificed his life for me when he did not have to. I will sacrifice all I have to care for and love this man. We had the privileged to meet them in our last few days in Nepal. They have two children and you can see the love in their eyes for one another.
Like I said I can tell you story after story of lives that have been restored. To see these young women reach back to change lives and communities where they live shows the love that they have received from those at PRC. These young women are not just survivors they are leaders that see the difference they can make.

Here are a few more images from our trip. This is a picture of the boarder between Nepal and India which is no border at all and why traffickers have such an easy time of it.
Thanks you again and may God bless you in your faithfulness to partner with us in the work Free for Life has been called to.

Colette & Dan

Play Day ...

Our hosts surprised us on the way back to Kathmandu by taking us to the Chitwan National Forest - thousands and thousands of acres of protected land. It is beautiful here with a river running through the area, mountains as a background, and all sorts of wildlife. In fact we took a Safari tour through the Forest and saw wild crocodile, rhinocerous, deer, Bison, a King Cobra snake, boar, elephants, beautiful parrots, all kinds of wildlife. It was a beautiful 4 - 5 hour trip mostly down trails, through the heavy trees, and occasionally just driving across the land in the tall grass.



A scene from the National Forest ...



We also got the chance to take an elephant ride! It was very fun - they seem like gentle giants. While we are riding this elephant through the Tharu village (these people live in 1 room adobe-like homes with straw roofs, packed in together) suddenly a little girl about age 8 runs up to our elephant crying hysterically. We find out that the wife of our "driver" has suddenly become sick, and about 2 minutes further down our journed we are passing a middle aged Tharu woman laying unresponsive surrounded by others. Our driver seems reluctant to abandon his post as driver but through our friends we insist that he stops and attends to his wife. He is finally willing to do so when he finds out that Dan is a doctor.


A typical Tharu home, picture taken from the elephant ...

A quick exam reveals that this woman has a stable pulse and blood pressure but is semi-comatose. 2 young men show up in a motorcycle and they get the go-ahead to transport the patient to a small clinic type hospital within 5 miles or so, and our patient is propped between them on the bike, and off they go with the man in the back holding her between the two of them.



Getting on our elephant ....



These are BIG animals!


We have a group prayer for this woman, and pray that God be glorified through this. Later that evening we hear word back that she is conscious, and expected to go home late that day - never knowing for sure what they found... still, we praise God for His continued faithfulness. We have been told by so many that we are in their prayers, and we truly know that we have are traveling under the covering of the Lord. Thank you everyone, it means SO much to us ...

Village Life

After traveling 7 hours and we came to our place to stay for the evening, although I hesitate to call it a hotel. As usual they gave us the best room in the house. Suman stayed downstairs in a room that held around 8 people and said there were extras in the room that evening as there were around 6 mice. All I can say is thank goodness for the invention of wet wipes because the road left us with a coating of dust that changed the color of Dan’s otherwise brown hair to a brownish white. Wet wipes would be our shower for 2 days.

After waking the next day we drove the final half an hour higher still. When I say higher in some parts of our trip we reached elevations of 6000 feet above sea level. We were to begin two of the most amazing days of our lives. The beauty is beyond belief. The land is fertile with flat patties being carved out of the mountain where crops are alternated. Right now they are growing rice. The people are warm and welcoming.

The village - plowing a field the hard way ...

Throughout the country & over the years,
many of the 'hills' have been planed down by

hand to allow for the growing of crops.

Didi is a young woman that was rescued as a result of the border monitoring program. Part of PRC’s reintegration is to go up to the village to speak to the family of the girl that was rescued, and educate her village and family as to what has happened to her so they will accept her back. In many cases this does not happen and the girls then live at the shelter home full time. Gratefully this would not be Didi’s story. She is from the lowest class of people here, called untouchables. That means no one will touch anything after they do, without washing it first. No one from another class will eat with them and they are given little and are extremely poor. Their children are usually not educated and cannot read or write.

The first thing we did when we got there was go to their house for lunch. The house consisted of two room stacked on top of each other both being no more that 10 or 11 feet square. There were 8 people staying in the house with one of them being a guest. There was a tree limb to the second floor with notches cut out of it for stairs. Inside the mud house it was surprisingly cool. Let me say that this was some of the best food we had eaten on this trip. Didi’s father knew we were coming a few days before and picked bananas from his tree. Bananas here are really good but this was a piece of fruit that horticulturalist work a life time to produce, a blue ribbon winner at any fair... Shanta is from one of the highest classes in Nepal Brahmin, and for her to be eating in their house is a great testimony to the rest of the village. To have included westerners is even more of an oddity. Shanta even stayed at their house over night because there was not room at the hotel.

The 'stairway to the 2nd floor ....

PRC had given Didi sewing training at the shelter home before she arrived back at her village, and had set her up with a space there in the village to teach classes to other girls. Now she is teaching a sewing class in the village that consists of about 20 girls for a course that will last about 6 months. All different classes of young women are coming to take the course. This not only has elevated Didi’s status (and her families) in the community, but is working to break the class barrier as well. She also has a small tailoring business that PRC helped set up with a micro loan. Didi and 9 others are part of this cooperative. This young woman is 24 years old and is changing the face of her community. Didi, along with her other 9 young girl cooperative partners are about to buy a piece of land where they will be able to sell the crops that they produce. This will again raise their standing, and now they can also become self-sufficient.

Didi had been led to Christ by PRC after experiencing the love that was given to her by them. She now has led 12 others to Christ, and they meet in that 10 foot square room for bible class. She is hoping to open a small church in the village where she lives. Right now she has to walk two hours each way to attend church. Didi is a success story, living in a remote part of Nepal where most people will not go. There is no other trafficking NGO’s that travel to where PRC does to make a difference in these girls lives, and give them options to stay in their village. They can not only be a success, but have the opportunity to change the lives of other young women that may not otherwise get a chance.

A sewing class in the village...

PRC is not only working with the sewing school, but about 3 miles up the road they run a non-formal school. That is one small room consisting of a chalkboard on the floor and well as words on big white pieces of paper nailed into the mud walls. All the women that come during their work day were never given the opportunity to read and write. They want to learn and desperately want their children to learn. There are there are around 12 students ranging in age from about 16 to 50. It was a class filled with joy and laughter that would otherwise not be there if PRC did not open and staff it. They truly are the hands and feet of Christ walking where others do not go.
Another note worth mentioning, we were the first white people that some of these people had ever seen. Not to mention someone with red hair, it was like the circus came to town. Everyone stared and whispered among themselves, you could see a combination of amazement and amusement on the faces that saw us. At one point the guys all got out of the vehicle to go look at a fish farm and Shanta and I went on down the hill a ways to wait for them to walk down. I got out of the car because it was so hot and let me tell you I drew quite a crowd. Walking around the car I was invited to sit on a bench in fount of a small shop. The man next to me asked where I was from and began to speak in broken English. Finally, I asked him where he learned to speak English and he informed me he was the school teacher. He had gone away to college to be a teacher and felt an obligation to come back and educate the children at the school. The crazy thing was they had a dial up connection and I left him my facebook as well as my email address.
While sitting there I saw a small girl with the most beautiful green eyes and lighter hair. She was obviously very poor. She wore a red had that had the word NICE on it. I said to the teacher that she probably has no idea what it even says. He said no she did not because she could not read. We had parked just as the school was getting out and almost all of the other children had school uniforms on. I asked why she was not wearing a uniform and he said it was because her family was so poor they could not afford one but they did allow her to come to school. I thought what chance does this beautiful small child have?

It was a great privilege and honor to be taken in to these people’s lives for a few days. It made up for the road once there, and I hope to go again,

The Clinic

(This post was written before we left Kathmandu, we just didn't have a chance to post it due to the lack of internet access)

We had an opportunity today to meet with Dr. Pushpa Bhatt, a physician here in Kathmandu that tells us about her work with “sex workers”. As we walk to the clinic we see signs everywhere for “massage”. One of our Scottish friends tells us he did some ‘undercover’ work and went into a business offering “Foot Massage”. Once inside, he tells us that it was clearly a brothel. Dr. Pushpa wants to especially help the children of these women avoid ending up on the streets or worse yet, in this lifestyle. She is hoping to set up some "day facilities" where these children can go. She also told us that she has approximately 50 HIV+ patients in her practice – primarily those trafficked or “sex workers”. Sex worker is a term that has been coined in recent years to make this sound more like a legitimate job than what it really is – prostitution. Period. But that sounds cold, and points out the harsh reality of what life is like for these young women. Used as objects, very often abused, STD’s, AIDS - this is an extremely high risk and degrading lifestyle. Thus the term sex worker or sex industry worker has become popular around the world…

Massage parlors are abundant here in the Thamel area of Kathmandu

Today we have about 16-18 girls present, all admitting to be “sex workers”. Fortunately, none of these girls are HIV+. We had the opportunity to ask questions and several of them are ex-trafficking victims who have now resigned themselves to this lifestyle. One tells us that if they just knew how to read, they would have realized that they were being taken into Delhi, tricked into forced prostitution, trafficked into the brothels of Delhi, India. The girls say that they make decent money (for a Nepali woman) and according to Dr. Pushpa as far as they are concerned it is too late for them. She says that her research shows that they now are more concerned about their children.

One sad fact we learn is that most of the girls clients are Westerners, Europeans, Americans, with a lesser amount being African, and very few Nepali clients. This is a business of supply and demand. And 'our people' are part of the problem, driving this business to be a multi-billion dollar business in virtually every corner of every country in the world.

Some of the girls we were interviewing

Then David Headley, part of the “Scottish contingency” with us, asks a very telling question: 'If there was a place here in Kathmandu that would take you in with your children, give you an education, feed you, teach you a trade, send your children to school… would you be interested in going?' The answer is a unanimous YES, OF COURSE. Well, P.R.C. is such a facility, and we realize that generally they don’t know about such an option, and wonder how many really would take that step if they knew...

We get a chance to meet some of their adorable children, and as we walk away we are left very saddened by the fact that young women from as young as 16 up to the age of middle or late twenties would think that their life is over. These young women need to be shown love. These young women need to be shown acceptance. Someone needs to invest in their lives, show them that they care, show them that they have a future and a hope. They need to be shown what true love really is – a love that can only be found from the Lord. These girls need the life changing knowledge of Jesus Christ. For without this, they are destined to continue to live the same unfulfilled life that they have been living, and their children are extremely likely to either end up on the streets or becoming trafficking victims themselves.

Before we leave, Colette makes sure that they hear that God loves them, that there IS a future and hope for them, that they ARE “worth everything” in the eyes of the Lord. We pray after we leave that the Lord will touch each and every one of these young women and their families. It is a prayer that we are believing in…

The miracles continue ...

We passed this child on the street sleeping.

We have started our journey out of Kathmandu. We had a full day trying to get our visa to travel into India. Now, I am not sure we are going to go. While we were waiting for the gates to open, we were sitting drinking water. Water is truly the most precious natural resource that we have. Kathmandu has a major water shortage. I saw this little dog when I was paying for water. I asked the young man behind the counter if it was his dog. He said no, he was just a street dog. I don’t know why he caught my attention after seeing men crawling down the street begging, and children huffing solvents through bags surrounded by dogs, as if in one crazy pack. But this dog had the sweetest face, and as I talked to him he wagged his tail. That is when I noticed he was dying. On the way out of the Indian embassy I had some cheerio’s in my bag and tried to give him, some but he was beyond taking them. I looked back to see him labor as we drove away and thought - this is what abject poverty is like, you suffer before people's eyes with barely a notice. Mostly it seems like an inconvenience as people pass those that are asking for money. Then one day they are just not there anymore. Who is really left to mourn?

A community by the river where people are living ...

We drove to our first stop in Butwal, where one of the offices that PRC has to reach the community is located. Here we changed vehicles. We were told the SUV we were driving would not make the trip to where we were going, and I was about to find out why. We rented a 4 wheel drive Jeep with a driver. Driving for about an hour though a windy bumpy dirt road we came to a village when our clutch cable suddenly broke. Now for the miracle - it broke right in fount of a mechanic that had a new cable! It took him 15 minutes to fix it and we were on our way. Oh, and the cost: 100 rupees which is about $1.25. Anytime before and we would have been walking for miles to get to that village, any time after and we would have been stuck in the middle of nowhere taking perhaps days to get back. God is with us on this trip. I thank you all so much for your prayers, know that God hears every one of them. It took us 7 hours to go 60 miles! With much of the time there appearing to be no road at all. The road was so bumpy that one of us would occasionally hit our head on the ceiling as we held on tight to stay in our seats nearly the whole time. The road is barely wide enough for one vechicle, and then another comes from the other way and the game of inches begins as you slowly work together to pass. One of you is always inches away from going over a steep mountain edge that seems to have no bottom.

Young man working on our car ...

Healings in more ways than one/ Update from last week

Saturday here is like our Sunday at home. We woke early and went to church. Church service located in a simple home filled with Love from the Lord. After walking up two flights of stairs, a church emerged with a pulpit at the front of the room. Side bar – the man whose house the church was in, I found out the next day said his mother is Canadian. Anyway, after the wedding on Friday some of the girls from PRC went over to help knocked down a wall to expand and all painted. No one had asked, they just wanted to help because that is what family does and the body of Christ is a family. I have just seen that over and over. This congregation has only been meeting for 3 months after a church split. They already have almost out grown the place they are meeting. Including us there were around 5 others that had not been to the church before.

At the service there was a visiting pastor from India who was preaching and also has a healing ministry. They had a youth choir with guitars and different percussion drums. It was so wonderful to hear them sing although we didn’t know the songs you could feel the presence of God as they worshiped and prayed. The visiting pastor preached from John 15 about how we are to abide in the Lord and how we can expect God to prune us so we can produce more fruit. Although he spoke in Nepalese I felt each scripture was speaking to my heart and refreshing me to be challenged. Another side bar - as I write this I can hear the girls singing praise and worship music down stairs in the house. Back to the church service, later Saturday afternoon the congregation invited friends to bring back other friends for a healing service at the church, and 10 people were healed including me

After church I went and asked the pastor to pray for me. I am not sure why but since we landed my eyes have been so swollen. Not just my eyes but face was swollen and I could barely open my eyes at all. It was bad. After the service I asked him to pray over my eyes and he prayed along with a few others and my eyes were healed. The swelling started to go down immediately. Praise God. The swelling in my eyes has not come back since then.

Colette & Dan

God's blessing are abundant ...

So let me pick up from where Dan left off. We were so blessed on Friday to be a part of an amazing day. There was a young woman that lived at PRC after being rescued from trafficking. She had been here for 2 years and been part of the family here. They arranged an introduction to a wonderful man and on Friday they were married. There was about 40 people here with members of the church attending and some of his extended family. She was so beautiful dressed in a beautiful red Sari. The wedding was very colorful. They have a custom where the bride cries during the wedding - I guess to show her family that she will miss them. At one point Suman was teasing her that she was not crying very much.

There was a white wedding cake and like most weddings more food than anyone could actually eat. The food was incredible. Mom if you are reading this these girls could really give you a run for your money.

After the wedding the group from Scotland had been given the very rare opportunity to conduct some interviews with three of the girls for a film that they are working on. Each girl shared with courage her story of how she had been lured into being trafficked, and some of what they had endured. The moments shared where heartbreaking and we were privileged to have them trust us enough to share their stories. One of the questions that each girl was asked was ... What has it meant to you to be here at PRC. They all answered the same way. This is where they found love and found Jesus. This has become a family. I can say that the Love of God lives in this home through everyone here.

The most amazing blessing we had was to meet a woman named Buna. She is such a living testimony to the Lord. Although she is very small, and probably only weighs about 80 pounds, we are told that she was about 50 pounds when she came to P.R.C. She had contracted an unknown illness while in the brothels in Mumbai, India and was basically sent back to Nepal for hospitalization in Nepal. They discovered her to be HIV+ and was the very first case of HIV diagnosed in the country of Nepal. This was approximately 20 years ago! Shanta brought Buna home from the hospital when they could do nothing for her, and she loved her back to health over a 1 year period. She has had many setbacks including tuberculosis (twice), and meningitis. Yet she is alive, healthy, and now an integral part of the organization her at P.R.C. She now not only runs the shelter home in Bhutwal, but she is now on the Board of Directors at P.R.C. !!! She is truly an amazing woman with a beautiful smile, a great business sense, and a true love for Jesus. She gives Him all the glory for all that she has endured, and she has been allowed and encouraged to become a leader in this environment. We are so honored just to know her ...

This is a day that I will never forget ...

Here is a picture of the main building at the P.R.C. complex