There are an estimated 70,000 prostitutes in Mexico City. Somewhere between 2500 and 5000 of those are under the age of eighteen. Some of these women and children are refugees and runaways tricked with the promise of a job and a future. Some of these women and children are physically kidnapped. The children frequently are forced into prostitution by a parent or other family member. Many of them are forcefully drugged until they become addicted which improves compliance with their captors and pimps. Some of them are expected to turn upwards of eighteen “tricks” (sexual acts) a day just to keep from owing their pimps money. While they work the streets they are continually watched by “falcones” - men paid by the pimps to prevent the girls from running away. Misconduct results in beatings. Sometimes beatings are just a part of everyday life. I just returned from a mission trip to Mexico City, and these women and children, along with the missionaries there serving them daily, are the people we went to serve.
The story of our Mexico mission trip begins before we even set foot on a plane. Just a few weeks before we’re scheduled to leave there is a major miscommunication (due either to translation issues or cultural communication quirks) between our team and the Mexico City team that threatens to blow up the whole trip. About two weeks before we’re scheduled to leave, I wake up with a stuffy nose, headache, and dizziness. "Allergies" I thought, no big deal. A week goes by and things get worse rather than better. I’ve got a sinus infection. I have never, in my entire life, had a sinus infection. About four days before we’re set to leave I start taking a heavy-duty antibiotic which destroys my stomach - Montezuma’s revenge before I even get to Mexico. About a week before we’re set to leave, one of our number starts running a high fever with several other unexplained symptoms earning him a trip to the doctor and a test for Lyme disease (thankfully negative). He goes on heavy duty antibiotics a couple of days before the trip. His fever only breaks the day before we’re set to leave. Another of our number has passport issues. He has to drive to Atlanta the day before the trip and stand in line at the passport office to hopefully get one printed right then and there. The day before we’re set to leave, the leader of our mission trip has sudden unexplained jaw pain. His face swells up like he’d been punched. He gets in to see a doctor the morning before we get on the plane and gets heavy duty antibiotics for an infected parotid gland. I’ve always had difficulty with spiritual warfare. I “believe” in it, on an intellectual level, but it’s hard in everyday life to acknowledge that circumstances are ever more than just coincidence. In this case though, it’s obvious that something is actively working against this trip, and that was a new experience for me.
The mission we went to serve is called El Pozo de Vida - The Well of Life. They have offices and ministries all around Mexico City specializing in three areas: Prevention, Intervention, Restoration. From their main offices, they run a company called Nunayu, a restoration project, where they teach former victims of sex trafficking to make and sell jewelry. Using virtual reality goggles, I watched the story of a Bangladeshi woman, 23, forced into prostitution at age nine by her mother. She was given drugs to make her develop more quickly. The drugs and the hard life make her look fifty instead of twenty-three. There is a safe home for underage girls rescued from sexual slavery. The roof of this building is trimmed with razor wire. The doors to the outside require keys to open. Visitors aren’t allowed cell phones. These precautions are in place to protect the girls from themselves as much as from outsiders. These children are so severely brainwashed that they will borrow or steal cellphones from visitors to call their pimps. They want nothing more than to return to their previous lives. El Pozo works to provide restoration for these girls. They provide for their physical well-being through free medical care and a live-in nurse at the home. They address their emotional and psychological well being through individual and group therapy sessions. They tend to their spiritual needs through daily prayer and Bible study and they attend church services, though only in small groups of two or three – girls have attempted to escape at church before. El Pozo tries to give these girls a normal teenage life. While we were there we got to celebrate a quinceanera (15th birthday) for one of the girls. I’m not a dancer, but it is customary for all the men at a quinceanera to dance with the birthday girl, so I did – extremely poorly. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time for most of our dance and she stepped on my toes more than once. It made her giggle and blush and it felt good to me to be the reason her and her friends were laughing. El Pozo has a second home for women who are over seventeen. This transition home is free while the women are working or going to school. Finding a job is difficult for a former prostitute. Pimps and johns don’t make good professional references. This ministry cares so tangibly for these women that they do not stop with rescuing and offering housing. They reach out to local businesses and make connections so these women can get jobs and earn livings.
God often orchestrates situations to accomplish many things at once and in the moment, most individuals involved only see one little sliver of that grand design. As with spiritual warfare, I “know” that but rarely recognize or acknowledge it when I experience it. I take a medicine that is quite effective at dealing with my chronic depression but has the unfortunate side effect of increasing my anxiety. Our first day in Mexico City, the fifteen of us piled into a van with no air conditioning to visit the El Pozo offices. It’s not hot in Mexico City. It rarely gets above 84°F the whole year, but fifteen people packed in with instruments and bags and no air conditioning in barely moving traffic... things get pretty hot. I made the mistake of sitting in the very back of the van nowhere near any open window. When air gets hot and stale around me I start to feel claustrophobic. In this instance, I was fighting with every thought and prayer against the onrush of panic. I was too embarrassed about being on the verge of a panic attack to ask anyone to pull over. I was on the brink of screaming and diving over seats in attempt to find fresh air when the van suddenly stopped, dead, in the middle of a Mexico City street. We were out of gas. I was ecstatic to be among the ones piling out to push the van a quarter mile or so down a busy street to the nearest gas station. I see this as God’s orchestration for at least two other reasons. It was an excellent team building exercise. At the end of the week, one of our number said, "on every mission trip I've been on, there's always at least one person about whom I'm thinking I've had just about enough of this person and just need to get away but there's no one like that on this trip". Everyone else agreed. Secondly, our guide, Rodrigo, (who was driving the van) said he was scared to death about what we'd think or do when the van ran out of gas. Presumably, there are some mission teams that would have just sat on the side of the road while he tried to get a tow truck out there. Because of our take-whatever-comes attitude, Rodrigo said we were one of the best teams they’d ever had.
I woke one morning in Mexico City feeling a strong desire to get just the guys together and share my story of sexual sin. I struggled most of my adult life with an addiction to pornography. This addiction was so strong that I even carried it secretly into my marriage. By God’s grace, I have been free from the bonds of that addiction for many years now, but there are permanent scars in me and in my marriage. However, I’ve chosen not to be ashamed of it anymore. It is probably the most powerful part of my redemption story. It is a wonderful testament to God’s power to rescue and to redeem. I didn’t fully realize it until after I’d gathered these men together and shared with them, but every time that I’ve shared my story with others God has moved powerfully in some way. Men have chosen to open up and confess their own struggles. Men have chosen to fight back in ways they never could before. Men have even been rescued completely from their own addictions. God’s strength is made perfect and glorified through my weakness. (2nd Corinthians 12:9, paraphrased obviously)
Pornography, like prostitution, is a form of human trafficking. Despite the illusion the of proud “porn star” in America, most girls and women do not engage in pornography willingly. Though somewhat indirectly, my problems with porn had contributed to the enslavement of the women at El Pozo. Lust, pornography, adultery, prostitution – these are not different sins. Jesus said so: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” Matthew 5:28. These are all just different points on single sliding scale of sin. When we asked the people working for El Pozo “what can we do to help?” the overwhelming answer was “go back to America and try to change the culture”. America is the biggest driver of the problem. It would take several books to fully explain that but here’s a quick stab at it. Sex trafficking is an economic problem. The use of pornography generates revenue and it generates demand. There is an economic pressure produced by consuming pornography on the Internet that incentivizes both women and traffickers to get involved. And that economic pressure doesn’t stop with pornography. Many who utilize prostitutes started with pornography. If there’s money to be made enslaving girls for porn, there’s money to be made enslaving them for prostitution. America is the largest consumer of online pornography by a huge margin. America by-and-large creates the economic demand that drives human sexual trafficking. If we could change that culture, we could literally change the world.
In America, prosperity dulls the shine of the miraculous. Dulled glory brings about dulled passion. Dulled passion diminishes hope and expectation in God's future graces and redemptive works. The women who work in this ministry are passionate. They have hope in God's future plans. They have faith in His strength to carry out those plans. They go boldly into the darkest places, not because they feel they are bringing the light into those places, but because they are obediently following the Light that's already on Its way there. When they speak of the love of Christ they do so without a shred of doubt because they witness it daily. "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few" (Matthew 9:37) In our short week there we saw hundreds of prostitutes, and dozens upon dozens of their enslavers (pimps, falcones, johns). Maybe thirteen or fourteen people working daily to free them all. Jesus' heart is for the enslaved, and the people of El Pozo are His hands and feet in a part of the world rampant with literal slavery. "He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners" Luke 4:18/Isaiah 61:1.
Because of the work they are doing, the people of El Pozo have a unique perspective on the power of forgiveness. They walk with women who were kidnapped or forced into prostitution by a parent, sometimes before the age of ten, women who were forcibly drugged, who were raped multiple times a day for years. They see these women give their hearts over to Jesus, and they see them forgive. I struggle to forgive the old lady who merges onto the interstate at 40mph and these women forgive their parents, their captors, their pimps, their rapists. That's a powerful act. That's a level of grace I find hard to even imagine.
The most impactful time on the trip, the most surprisingly, selflessly, good act I witnessed was the El Pozo Block Party. Once a month, the people of El Pozo, along with sixty to eighty volunteers from all over Mexico City and mission trips from all over the world, bring food, drinks, music, and gifts into one of the most spiritually dark and dangerous parts of the city. At 9pm on Saturday night we walked down to the heart of the La Merced marketplace. At this time of night all the street vendors are gone, all the sidewalk shops locked by graffiti covered steel rollups. There’s a 12’ high chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the street. Along that fence, dozens and dozens of men are lined up. Some are johns, some are pimps and falcones, and, perhaps strangest of all, some are there just to watch. Along the steel covered shops there are dozens and dozens of prostitutes. Military style police vehicles drive back and forth down the street all night with lights flashing. A group of twenty or more police officers in tactical gear marched by in formation. The sun has set and the street lights are few and far between. It’s dark in all the ways a place can be dark. But here, like a tiny candle flame in this vast ocean of darkness, is this group of sixty or so people just having fun. This wasn’t evangelism. There were no street preachers, no pamphlets or Bibles being pushed into people’s hands. Just a group of people handing out hotdogs and churros to the pimps and johns, carrying long stemmed flowers with notes of encouragement to the working girls, groups walking down the side streets inviting anyone they passed to the party, teenagers painting little kids fingernails (the children of the prostitutes), a six foot tall white girl with flaming red hair laughing and talking with the dirtiest homeless guy you’ve ever seen, gringos trying desperately to remember anything from 12th grade Spanish 2, three guys with guitars, microphones, and a PA system that had no power because there was nowhere to plug it up… it was amazing. El Pozo treats this block party like it’s their neighborhood. Like they’ve just invited all their best friends over for a backyard barbeque. There’s no judgement or animosity, no calls to repentance or haughty eyes looking down on the sinners. Just Jesus’ love poured out on those most in need.
I'm a cynic. It is an area of great sin in my life. I confess that my judgy inner-monologue has often gone like this: Oh, you spent three grand to fly to a poor country and give some poor kids Bibles? Now you're a 'new man' in Jesus and you're going to go on two mission trips a year because you've had a 'mountain top experience'? This trip made it clear to me that, yes, that's exactly how it's supposed to happen. God expects us to go and be refilled by encounters with Him. That's part of why we go to church every week. We should go on mission trips as often as we're able, not just because the poor kids need the Bibles, but because we need to give the Bibles. I already had a heart for helping people deal with sexual sin, but this trip fueled that in a way nothing else ever has. There is a power in seeing with your own eyes. God moves something inside you when you physically touch someone who's been extraordinarily hurt by someone else's sin - your sin. Sure, that fire in me will wear off, but hopefully by then I'll be preparing to go back or go elsewhere and be filled up again.
I've struggled for over a month to write this. That is mostly because the experience was so amazing, so important, and no matter how hard I try, these words just seem to fall miles short of conveying that. Part of that is pride and part of it is fear of portraying something so important as uninteresting. When I think about the way God has moved in men's hearts whenever I've shared my story, I feel like He's saying to me "I'll do the work, you just start the conversation". In the same way, my words will never be adequate to describe what I experienced or to change minds about human trafficking or sexual exploitation, but here's my stab at starting the conversation. I'm so thankful that I got to go on this trip. I'm so grateful to God and to all those who supported me in prayer and financially for the profound experience I had. If you have questions or thoughts on this letter, sex trafficking, or pornography I’d love to hear them. It would be an honor to share more or talk with you about my trip or my experiences.
Thanks again for all your support!
If you’d like more information or want to support El Pozo de Vida, please visit their website http://www.elpozodevida.org.mx/
