First Impressions of Svay Pak -- Toph

(This was my part of the Team's report back to the congregation, read this morning)

When we first turned off the highway, we entered another world. The turn was unmarked—no one comes to Svay Pak who doesn’t already know where it is. We rumbled along a dirt road and first saw the white façade of Rahab’s House. The folding metal gate, the building’s entrance, had been drawn, and the front room, clean and painted, felt receptive, with Clayton, our Aim4Asia contact, awaiting us. Inside were wooden desks, and coloured visions of Bible stories on the wall. For the first twenty-five feet, it looked fine, safe, healthy, with a wooden staircase leading to an upper floor; not like what I imagined a brothel to be at all.

I was wrong. Access to the remaining eighty feet of the building’s depth was along a thin corridor: two people would squeeze by one another if they passed. And off the corridor were the rooms. First, on each side, came the grey-white rooms, larger spaces where deals could be struck for the sale of children. And then came the pink rooms: numbered one through five along the right, and six through nine on the left. I can describe their size (about six-and-a-half-feet square, just large enough for a stained, wooden bench-bed) and the colour (a dusty pink), but neither of these describes the rooms. They were filthy; light fixtures dangling, dust and dirt everywhere, greasy cobwebs sticking to moist walls. And the graffiti, beside little flower stickers—scratches for help, with confusing messages proclaiming “I love you” over and over: Was this a script for the girls enslaved there? Or the words they had continually heard? Or a genuine cry for honest affection, from family, friends, or from God? We had no idea. Doors hung askew, wood was rotten. Behind them the cold emptiness of the cement kitchen, two fetid mosquito-infested wash-basins, and a squat pot gave way to the exit, which had been cemented over, to prevent any escape.
The weight of the evil on the place was viscous. And all this was in the dark, seen only by flashlight. We were sneezing from the dust, we were crying from the asphyxiating burden hanging over the place, and we were stumbling in the dark, both literally and metaphorically. And we weren’t alone.

Eee eee, we heard coming from the cold concrete darkness, eee eee. A few of us suspected it was a bat, and our hearts clenched at the prospect of our work before us. Eee eee. What were we doing in this place, why had we been called here, now? And were we ready? Eee eee. And that’s when we had our first little miracle: the cry in the darkness was found to be a baby kitten, trapped and abandoned by its mother, living in that building, somehow, alone. But God had brought us there at a time where we could rescue it, and give it the hope of better life and care. We had a purpose amongst those filthy, evil walls. Within half an hour, our sledgehammers had begun their assault on the remains of the brothel.