Pastor begins crusade to fight child sex trade

Thousands of young girls are sexually exploited in Thailand every year, known only by a number in the bars that employ them as child prostitutes.

A Port Huron pastor -- with the help of his wife and two teenage daughters -- is working to turn those numbers into names and rescue as many children as they can.

Dennis Cook, the pastor at The Restoration Station in Port Huron, said he never expected to start his own mission organization. 

But after traveling to Bangkok, Thailand, this summer on a mission trip with his oldest daughter, Mackenzie Cook, 17, the reality was too much to ignore.

The logo for Numbers 2 Names, a mission organization started by Dennis Cook, pastor at The Restoration Station in Port Huron. NUMBERS 2 NAMES Numbers 2 Names was started to help women and children who are being sexually exploited in Bangkok, Thailand.

"You're dealing with 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds that are wearing numbers in these bars," Cook said, explaining how girls wear numbers to make it easier for men to select them. "They have to perform a dozen, two dozen times a day."

After walking the streets of the red light district in Bangkok and hearing the girls' life stories from workers in shelters across the city for 10 days, Cook said Mackenzie was deeply affected.

"Her heart was broken," he said.

Mackenzie had a profound thought on one of their last days of the trip.

"She said, 'Why not turn the numbers into names?'" Cook recalled.

And so the mission was born.

Numbers 2 Names consists of the entire Cook family -- including his wife, Heidi, and their younger daughter, Morgan, 14. They have been selling T-shirts to pay for a return trip to Bangkok in mid-December.

Rampant poverty and devastating floods often force Thai families to sell or give their daughters away, Cook said.

"I have two young girls, and this hit me really hard," he said. "I would crawl on broken glass to save my girls. No one's crawling on broken glass to save these girls."

Cook said he and his daughter visited a school outside the city where workers are trying to educate young girls in hopes they won't end up wearing a number in a bar. The reality is, most of them will, he said.

"You just want to throw up," he said.

On their upcoming trip, Cook said the family will be visiting some of the safe houses and shelters in Bangkok that are trying to help the girls involved in child prostitution. Funding

for the safe houses is as rare as the presence of the shelters themselves.

There are only a few shelters in Bangkok, all independently run by outside organizations, Cook said.

Inside the shelters, women and girls are encouraged, educated, counseled and treated with art therapy sessions -- which have come to yield beautiful products.

The jewelry and hand-made goods the women make in the shelters to express themselves are items Cook hopes to bring back to Port Huron to sell.

Money from the sale of the items will go directly back to the women, he said. He's currently looking for a storefront.

Eventually, Numbers 2 Names hopes to provide a Thai New Testament to every girl who comes through the safe houses.

"It is one thing every Sunday morning to quote a statistic ... it is another thing to meet a statistic," Cook said.