Life Place Care Center—Durban, South Africa

Every evening, as the sun sets over a large downtown area of Durban, South Africa, the sex industry thrives. The streets are filled with “massage parlors” fronting as brothels, and young men and women roam around looking to sell their bodies for drugs or cash.

The older women (in their twenties and thirties) work in “massage parlors,” while younger girls work the streets where the clientele is much larger. Pimps hover over these territories, making sure their “girls” are drugged enough to be able to work through an entire night. Meanwhile, the boys who sell themselves for sex — primarily to support a drug habit — work the beach area. As darkness settles over this area of Durban, the sense of evil is palpable.

Yet on these same downtown streets, just across from a brothel and bar, is a building space where men, women and children come and go daily with a different spirit. Life Place Care Center offers a bright haven to people looking to wrench themselves from the brutal lifestyle of the sex industry. The center provides counseling and HIV testing, as well as the love of Christ and godly instruction through weekly Bible studies.

Set up like a coffee shop, Life Place Care Center is a welcome presence to the desperate women who come in nightly looking for a way our of the vicious life of prostitution. Some are sick with AIDS, most are in abusive situations with their violent pimps, and many have children that they aren’t able to take care of.

These broken women find a listening year and consoling presence in Petra Luna and her staff at Life Place Care Center. Petra and the others walk patiently with prostitutes though a lengthy rehabilitation process that offers healing from years of physical and mental abuse. Many of these women have been in prostitution since adolescence, and the lifestyle has taken a deep tool of them.

Curious pimps also visit Life Place Care Center, many seeking a way out of their own despair. Some have given their lives to Christ and been transformed, leaving their lucrative livelihood in the sex industry and finding respectable ways of earning. Most of the prostitutes at the center have never known other work, and Petra and her staff provide them with training in skills to equip them for good jobs.

A beacon for the gospel, Life Place Care Center has helped countless people get off the streets of this city. To help continue this vital outreach, World Challenge and Times Square Church have partnered with Doctors For Life international, the ministry that founded the center. Through the prayers and generous giving of supporters, the existing space has been renovated and is able to stay open. But the need is rising for a larger facility to accommodate the women’s rehabilitation and job training.

Your support is greatly appreciated in seeing the ministry of Life Place Care Center continue. Thank you for your part in helping to bring hope to so many on the streets of Durban.