EMPOWER ASIA THAILAND has two discipleship homes in Thailand that mentor and develop our young people into future leadership, Esther House and Home of A New Dawn. Additionally we have many young people who have graduated and are now studying or in the work force.

Homes:

Esther House
Number of Kids - 20 girls
Commenced - 1988
Average Age - 15 years
Monthly Operation Cost - $1700

Home of A New Dawn
Number of Kids - 23 boys
Commenced - 1992
Average Age - 16 years
Monthly Operation Cost - $2300

Graduates
Number of Kids - 40
Commenced - N/A
Average Age - 22 years
Monthly Operation Cost - $200

Thailand:
Population of 63 million.
Religious makeup: 95% Buddhist/Spirit worship, 4% Muslim

In Thailand child prostitutes … are beaten, raped, and put to work servicing 10 to 20 men a day. They have only a few days off a month for their period, and a daily allowance of about $1.20 to pay for their food and all other expenses … Their abductor uses a combination of physical and mental abuse, threats of revenge and even death. Some brothels are surrounded by electrical fences making it impossible for the girls to escape … At first as they resist sexual encounters, they are badly beaten … Many children forced into prostitution are often constantly raped to degrade, humiliate, and to break down their resistance by destroying their sense of self worth … Many police officers are paid off by pimps or brothel owners and are themselves regular customers and even brother owners, thus not only overlooking the problem itself but also participating and supporting it. Thailand has been refereed to as “Disneyland for Pedophiles” and has up to 600,000 AIDS cases and a huge sex-for-sale industry, driven mostly by Thais but also tourists who come to rent what they want. The number of sex workers in Thailand ranges from 800,000 to 2 million. About 20% of these prostitutes are 18 years of age or younger.
Edited articles taken from “Disneyland for Pedophiles” and “Women Refugees Face Sex Slavery in Thailand

Pam (pictured left) and Dawn are from one of Thailands most impoverished provinces where it is common for girls to be sent into the sex industry or trafficked overseas into places like Japan or the Middle East.
Pam (18) and her sister Dawn (20) came to live at Esther House around the year 2000. Through no real fault of their own they could easily have ended up like so many other kids. Thanks to EMPOWER ASIA’S intervention at a young age the future of these two girls and many others like them is now safe and has gone well beyond what they could have hoped or expected.

Having come from a village where people worship demons, both girls have now become Christians. Dawn is studying at university where she is considering becoming a missionary to Cambodia while Pam has graduated high school and will shortly commence business studies at university.

Tok Keow is a Thai expression. Its literal translation is the green harvest. It is a euphemism for the trafficking of young girls for the sex trade.
Esther House is home that protects girls at-risk, through no fault of their own of being forced or tricked into Thailand’s huge green harvest. We specifically target girls about age 13 years from villages and provinces that have a long history in sending its young women entering into prostitution.

In both our boys and girls homes we have a discipleship program in place for each teenager.
Our aim is to disciple impoverished non-Christian teenagers from ethnic groups that have historically been resistant to the
Gospel so that they one day may become dynamic and influential Christian leaders within their own communities. We carry out our work via operating safe houses that really are just discipleship homes.
At our two discipleship homes our teenage boys and girls do all the work including helping buy and cook all of the food from the market, assisting in carrying out building construction projects, carrying out our integrated chicken and fish farming projects and cultivating the crops (especially the yearly rice crop) as well as caring for and breeding a small herd of cows. This is because we proactively work to develop the level of work-ethic within our kids. We firmly believe that quality and effective young Christian leaders must know how to work hard and to do so with due commitment and accountability.

Many of our graduates are studying at university or at Bible college while other are working at our houses and acting as front line leaders at the homes. We have young people now studying at post-graduate level with one guy having just completed a Masters degree and another studying at PhD level.

We have insufficient funds to run all of these works as they presently stand and certainly we do not have enough support to take on more at-risk youth. Would you like to give? It would be fantastic if you could. Donations from the USA and Canada can be sent to Global Tribe but must be specifically designated for Empower Asia.

If you want to know more then you can go to our website at www.empower.asia