Pattaya, Thailand
January 4-12, 2025
Calling all prayer warriors, ESL teachers, and hairdressers!
Come and personally engage with The Tamar Center in Pattaya, Thailand. The Freedom Challenge has been actively supporting and praying for this ministry. We are honored to participate in what God is doing through the local team in Pattaya. During this trip, you will be able to meet the Tamar Center Team and help with outreach.
Get right to the heart of our mission by seeing firsthand the lives our organization impacts.
Together with Freedom Sisters, you will have the opportunity to serve alongside passionate field workers and meet women and children impacted by our projects!
SPACE IS LIMITED. Only accepting 6 women. Please register early!
About Tamar Center
Tamar Center was started in 1999 as a ministry of Project L.I.F.E. Foundation in Thailand. Our vision is to show the love and compassion of Jesus by offering hope, healing and a new life to the estimated 35,000 bargirls and ladyboys involved in prostitution in Pattaya. We do this by reaching out, building relationships, offering shelter and housing, offering vocational training, counseling and providing Bible teaching.
Tamar Center operates two centers in Pattaya. In Soi 6 we have our Outreach Center which includes a Hair Salon, the House of Peace – a place for women working in the bars to come and rest, we offer free English Classes and have a House of Prayer on the top floor. On 3rd Road in Pattaya, we have our Main Office which includes our Restaurant and Bakery, Card and Handicraft Room, Counseling Center and Offices. In addition to these Centers we have rented ten houses in a small and quiet street where we have a nursery for the children of the women and accommodation for all the women in our programs. Tamar team members also do regular outreaches to Issan (the north east region of Thailand), the region where most of our women come from.
Pattaya City stretches for about 15 km along the Gulf of Thailand and is located about 100 km south of Bangkok. It is the unofficial Sex Tourism Capital of the world. More than 12 million tourists visit Pattaya each year. The main reason for most people to come is the nightlife of the city.
Pattaya is on the east coast of Thailand and used to be a small fisherman’s village. During the Vietnam war, Pattaya became one of the top rest and recreation places for soldiers fighting in the war. As the soldiers came with money looking for a good time, girls were sent from all over the country to satisfy their needs. When the war ended many veterans returned to Pattaya and this is how the sex industry in Pattaya started.
When girls that worked in the bars in Pattaya returned to their home villages with money and/or a rich foreign husband people took notice and soon they wanted in on the money and started to send their young girls to Pattaya to provide income for the extended families. The families focus on the money the girls can send home if they find a foreign husband or work in the bars without realizing the reality and cost of the work in Pattaya. Nowadays women flock to Pattaya to earn easy money, to finance dreams like mobile phones, cars for their parents, finance the cost of university and schools for themselves and their children and many other reasons.
They travel to Pattaya in search of happiness and financial security; instead they find prostitution, loneliness and disease. Far away from their families and friends many girls desperately desire love, comfort, and help to find alternate employment.