Sex on the beach

We sat sipping our drinks in silence, trying not to look.



Between our table and the sunset, two men and three girls were touching and giggling. Young black skin sandwiching sagging white flab. The girls playfully fought over who would get to spend the night with the "handsome" old men. They drank as they teased, lidocaine for the soul.

A third man approached up the beach, also old, also white. He was accompanied by what appeared to be his wife, a pretty grey-haired lady, and their dog on a leash. He greeted the two men who were sitting and drinking. His wife watched him for a moment, then turned and looked the other way, continuing on down the beach with her dog. Almost instantly a fourth girl appeared.

One of the men and one of the girls took a few steps away from the others, down to the water's edge. Her taught breasts, barely covered with thin tight material, pressed above his exposed beer belly, as his flabby arms encircled her tiny body. They kissed and touched. I gagged. He kept grabbing her, and she laughed. Looking only at her, they could have been honeymooners in love. Looking at him, the illusion disappeared into wads of money and good acting.

The girls stayed with the men at the table well into the night, continuing to flirt. One looked up, and I was caught by her expression. Dead eyes in an undeniably teenage face, with a smile that belied her hell. Her childhood was gone long before it should have been.

It was everywhere we went. The arms of a young strong African man getting lost in the flabby folds of an overweight old white woman. A balding wrinkled man walking with a young beautiful African girl, ignoring her but paying close attention to her two toddlers. You couldn't walk down the beach without seeing these transactions happening. Eric asked a waitress one day what she thought about the sex tourism. She was blunt, she hated watching it happen. But despite being illegal, officials turn a blind eye because so many tourists expect it. After all, the customer is always right.

We tried to turn a blind eye as well, ignoring it as best we could in our need to de-stress from the work we'd been doing. For some reason, it didn't work. The understanding was always there, a constant reminder of how badly we need Jesus.

The sun set over the water, palm trees framing the silhouetted group laughing and drinking by the ocean. It could have been so beautiful.