Patricia Green is friendly and efficient. Meeting in a far more salubrious bar than her usual haunts in Thailand, she was neatly dressed with short hair and smart suit, and ready to take me through her incredible work with girls struggling through bar-work and prostitution.

As anyone who has ever looked slightly beneath the surface of the country's tourist industry will know, Thailand has a thriving sex industry. The bars and restaurants of cities such as Bangkok and Pattaya are full of young girls spending their nights working for pimps and bar-owners who exploit the youth and beauty of the vulnerable.

Patricia's Story
Originally from New Zealand, Patricia first went to Thailand in 1986 as part of a research team working on a survey for her social sciences degree. Struck by the plight of girls drawn into prostitution to gain money for their families, she returned in 1988 and has been there ever since. An Assemblies of God pastor, she already had experience running a Christian home for girls no one else would take, and moved into her current work with ease.

She began by spending time in the bars and restaurants talking to the girls and finding out their stories. Many of them had come from the country, from village families desperate for money, like Wandee who was trafficked from her home in North Burma by a lady who often visited the village to offer girls a chance for education in Bangkok. Wandee's family were poor and happy for her to go. Two days later Wandee found herself in a brothel in the south of Thailand. On her first day she was shown to a room with a man and told to do whatever he required. She was 13 years old.

Wandee managed to escape from the brothel and found a worker from Patricia Green's Rahab ministries, who helped her join one of the safe houses and Training Centre.

Rahab's Work
Rahab ministries has offices in the notorious Patpong region of Bankok, and Pattaya. Patricia and her team befriend the girls, who are often extremely lonely behind their highly made-up smiling faces, and offer the chance to talk. The Bangkok office runs a hairdressing school where they teach women wanting to leave the sex industry how to do hairdressing as an alternative means of earning a living. This also offers a chance for Rahab to meet women involved in the local sex industry as the women al need to go the hairdressers regularly to maintain their appearance.

Patricia explained why so many young girls get into such dire circumstances. "Either parents from tribal areas sell their child into what they think is going to be education but turn out to be life in a brothel, or they stick to the cultural tradition of sending their girls to the city to find money for the family," she said.

Often it ends appallingly, as with one young girl who now works running the invoices for the handmade cards made by ex-sex workers at Rahab. She was in a village with her husband, who then came to Bangkok for work. They ended up in a slum, where he started using drugs and getting into trouble, so she escaped, leaving the baby with her parents. She went to work in the bars and after seven frustrated months overheard a conversation in a bar between Rahab workers and other women.

"She heard the evangelism team talking about Jesus, and said to one of them: "Who is this Jesus, I would like to meet him?" recalled Patricia. "She came to the centre and after a while made a commitment and is now living in the safe house. She told me: "I was earning 30,000 a month but I had nothing - God's changed me."

This is one of the positive stories that keep Patricia going when things get tough. Sometimes girls get so far and seem keen to stay away from the bars, but then something takes them back. Families ask where the money has gone, and there is no option but to return to a life of sexual slavery. This is why Patricia is desperately keen to change attitudes both in Thailand and overseas. Countries such as Britain contribute to the crisis through the tourist industry. In the year 2000 more than 9.5million tourists visited Thailand - 70% of them were male, and 70% of the males went for sex, according to Immigration figures and those from the British embassy.

"That is why I spend some of my time on advocacy, encouraging people to be aware of what is going on and to lobby Governments," Patricia explained. "We need to pressurise the local Government and the Thai Government to promote good tourism and to restructure or tighten immigration."

Having spent many hours talking to and listening to girls who struggle with a life of prostitution Patricia naturally takes their side of the story. She and her colleagues and Rahab ministries will not write them off, as so many others have done, but are determined to treat them with "dignity and to encourage self respect". Even once the girls have become Christians it can be hard for them to stay close to God, as there are very few Churches and staying in touch can be difficult. Those churches that do exist are not sure whether or not to accept girls with a past.

The Church in Thailand
"The church in Thailand is still new and has not come to that stage yet," commented Patricia. "But AIDS will change this. If one of the elders becomes very sick, then the church is going to have to wrestle with this. "

Churches are "very healthy" in the cities, but struggling in the countryside and "it is not in the tribal tradition to get organised and go to church a long way off." But Patricia and her colleagues refuse to give up. She left to go and lobby more people about the tourist industry, and is unlikely to stop there - only a few days later, she was due to return to Thailand and get on with the job of helping her girls find a better life.

Patricia is looking for a personal assistant to assist her with the administrative work at Rahab. Any female between the ages of 25-40 who is interested in a long-term commitment to the work in Thailand should contact Patricia on rahab@bkk.a-net.net.th or PO Box 57, Patpong, Bangkok 10506, Thailand.

Claire Shelley is news editor at the Church of England Newspaper and managing editor of CounterCulture.

email: claireshelley76@hotmail.com

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