What a week!  The Women's Center is starting to look like a real place instead of a construction-style obstacle course.  Wires no longer hang from who-knows-where. All pipes reportedly actually connect to someplace.  The walls are being painted.  A beautiful painting has been donated for the walls in the high-ceiling-ed sunlight-filled living room.  Photo to come - I promise (now, just have to find someone to teach a sweet, helpless old woman how to get pictures from her camera to her computer and onto this blog...then, must go out and find a sweet, helpless old woman....details, details)

Friday I'm meeting with Rebecca Hathaway of Unlikely Heroes. This ministry creates safe houses for young women and children who have been trafficked into the sex trade. They already have one house in the Philippines and are building a second right now. They have a facility in Mexico with some children already in residence. More coming.  These children are very young and were often sold to traffickers.  Finally, Unlikely Heroes is laying the groundwork for an outreach to teens in prostitution in Oakland, California - right across the bay from San Francisco.

In Oakland, International Blvd has been called the longest "track" in America.  This means the street is the longest stretch of roadway used to sell human beings. Longer than "pick up sites" in Vegas. Longer than trafficking centers in Los Angeles.  Don't for one minute imagine "Pretty Woman" or high-end escorts making thousands of dollars.  This is desperation. Foster kids who aged out and now have no family, education or marketable trade. Runaway teens. Women may once have seen prostitution as a "way up" - or out. But, they soon become involved with pimps who promise "protection" but, in reality, threaten, coerce, abuse, and control everything....including the money.

Unlikely Heroes wants to create a healing and recovery curriculum for women (and another for children) in those safe houses. They believe, as I do, that the most effective way to help young women and children find healing and change is to integrate sound, trauma-informed counseling practices with inner healing prayer ministry, worship, and the living, loving, powerful presence of God.

So, Friday Rebecca and I meet to talk about this vision.  I have been preparing for the past 10 years for this.  It's no accident!

Will let you know what happens.  This is good, good, good!