Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christine Ege. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Christine thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?
Trained as a translator/interpreter of multiple foreign languages, my “career” veered off in an entirely different direction when I married at 21 and had five children. However, THAT was not the risk I am addressing here. For more than a decade, I conjugated verbs under my breath in Russian or talked to myself in Norwegian while folding an endless pile of laundry and preparing all of our meals from scratch (including all our bread). Trying to manage a schedule that included sports and music activities for all the children (on top of homeschooling for thirteen years and tutoring other people’s children at odd intervals) provided plenty of challenges.
When the last child abandoned us for college, I planned the grandest pity party on the planet and began speculating about who I really was or could ever be beyond laundry and teaching my children (who no longer needed my services, and rightly so). Needless to say, that pity party never happened. After assuming some leadership roles in a couple of local volunteer organizations, the issue of sex trafficking kept coming to my attention. I entered a period of investigating the horrific scope of the problem and assumed I might be well-suited to tutoring rescued teenage survivors of sex trafficking. Accordingly, I began tentatively exploring one particular organization that might benefit from my background and experience. Despite the fact that THAT activity might have been a logical step for me, it never happened.
Instead, somehow I felt myself drawn to the women and men ensnared in the sex industry in northeast Houston. Together with a friend, I walked into a strip club and a nearby brothel for the first time in December 2011. We brought what we naturally had offered our children and their friends all our lives: homemade cookies. We presented ourselves to the manager of the club as support chaplains (albeit not sent by any church) bearing gifts of cookies — cookies which he himself happily received. He then gave us blanket permission to visit the club regularly and distribute our gift bags with cookies and handwritten notes of encouragement. Over the course of the next few months, we expanded our little “route” to include other sex industry locations — strip clubs, brothels, and sex shops. We began visiting the same locations every two weeks for the purpose of building trust. Thus our outreach to the sex industry began — giving away around 8400 cookies a year. Nearly twelve years later, my little team still visits those in the sex industry, but we now also operate a non-profit bakery (baked goods & entrées) to raise public awareness of sex trafficking, to fund what we give away, and to ultimately hire staff — including fair-wage culinary internships for those wishing to exit the sex industry.
Why on earth would a former homeschooling mother spend time with people in the sex industry? Why would someone with no business experience whatsoever dare to launch a business to support such a strange form of outreach to a marginalized population? Why would an ordinary person like myself ever think she could sell bakery items and frozen main dishes to develop such a grandiose project? And what is a grandmother doing making friends with strippers and club owners? Yes, it seems profoundly risky when I look back on it; however, the odd thing is that it all developed organically and naturally. The only thing required besides consistency and perseverance has been that I give away what I already had (decades of baking and cooking for my own family) — and that I refuse to worry about what I don’t have in terms of talent or resources. In that sense, although launching Boundless Mercy and The Ark Bakery & Café is something most people would view as VERY risky, I have truly found my passion!
Christine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
In December 2011, a friend and I felt burdened to visit sex industry workers and began visiting employees in one strip club and one brothel in Northeast Houston. Our hearts were profoundly gripped by the need for support and encouragement people expressed, as well as by the appreciative welcome we experienced. Without any official structure, business plan, or funding source, we gave out what we had most readily available: cookies! Both of us were mothers of five children, former homeschooling moms, and had spent our entire lives baking and cooking from scratch for our families. We never intended to continue this activity indefinitely, but somehow we found ourselves visiting more and more sex industry locations and fell into an every-other-week routine. Before long, we became known to those employed in local sex industry businesses and were distributing thousands of cookies (accompanied by a brief handwritten note for each gift bag recipient) a year.
A couple of years after that first outreach, Boundless Mercy became the name of the organization; it ultimately acquired 501(c)3 non-profit status, with The Ark Bakery & Café becoming the online “public face” of Boundless Mercy in 2018/2019. Although both parts of the organization have Facebook pages, only The Ark has a website, as it is important to protect the confidentiality of the outreach team’s activities and the individuals still working in the sex industry; those relationships of trust have taken time to build, and we cherish the friendship with those we visit. We currently produce and distribute over 8000 cookies per year (given away free to sex industry workers). We secure permission from club managers and madams to distribute the cookies and provide encouragement and spiritual support to employees. Boundless Mercy’s outreach team does not publish the names of the people or locations visited.
On the other hand, The Ark Bakery & Café (www.thearkbakerycafe.org) currently produces cottage industry baked goods as well as commercially prepared main dish items for sale to the public. We work in two local commercial kitchens with proper licensing and practices. In March this year, we opened a sales outlet for our products, which are sold frozen for consumption off-premise. All funds beyond our expenses are funneled back into anti-trafficking initiatives. The goal is to expand our customer base enough to consolidate production and sales under one roof, which would then allow us to seek culinary internship funds to hire individuals who wish to exit the sex industry. (Many people have never worked outside the sex industry, have no education, and no job training. They would welcome a fair wage job in a supportive work environment.)
Human trafficking – and every expression of injustice, for that matter – has its roots in de-personalizing, de-humanizing, and objectifying other people. When we de-personalize and commoditize another human being, we commit an egregious sin. Every person has value.
Given a different set of circumstances and vulnerabilities, any of us could have been trafficked. Without financial, physical, and emotional assistance from a supportive family and community, young mothers find themselves with no other avenue (outside of the sex industry) to feed their children. They often have no parental guidance and have no means of continuing their education or job training.
Our biggest inspiration in this work is those we serve. I love seeing people respond to simple kindness. It is a privilege to earn their trust and refer them to sources that can offer practical help, counseling, and job opportunities. A sense of being an orphan pervades much of our culture – even adults can feel abandoned, rejected, and orphaned. Most people simply want someone to listen to them; they need and want to be heard. It is a tremendous joy to listen to people and encourage them to have hope for a better future.
In our case, we have the gift of loving people through a culture of food and family. We are wives and mothers with grown children. We are ordinary grandmothers with decades of experience in the kitchen and our homes. We give ourselves away in ordinary ways, albeit in extraordinary settings! We cannot imagine doing anything else!
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We personally produce everything we sell. We have a team of volunteers at this point and hope one day to be able to hire a few of them. At this point, we have relied on our own culinary background and experience (mostly mine!) to develop the recipes and scale them for larger production quantities and sales. We have worked hard to streamline our processes and to find ways to guarantee the quality of our finished products.
We have noticed that, while growing, it is natural and normal to hit a wall that hinders us in some way. As we persevere, new avenues of overcoming or circumventing that “wall” ultimately present themselves. For example, we got to the point we could not bake enough product in our home ovens to sell to the public beyond what we were giving away (350 large cookies every two weeks). Through an indirect personal connection, a local church opened its commercial kitchen to us, and it turned out that this kitchen had a baker’s rack oven to bake multiple trays of cookies simultaneously! We continue to hit similar walls in our operation and now regard them as growing pains. Eventually, a solution presents itself that resolves whatever problem we have been facing.
We have also learned to enjoy the journey and not to expect everything to be perfect all the time. We need to remember to cultivate a spirit of community with one another as we labor to “combat trafficking in tangible ways by making every crumb count.” People come first, and products are secondary.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We actually have two markets:
1. The clients we serve in the sex industry, who receive baked goods absolutely free every two weeks
They are only “markets” in the sense that we are a non-profit, and we exist to support and encourage them. If we cannot succeed in building trust and friendship with those individuals, they may never have the hope and assurance that any change is possible or any other career might ever work out for them. They need a listening ear and referrals to resource providers (counseling, assistance with basic needs, including housing, safety, etc.). They need to see that we prioritize our conversations with them and that we respect them. They need to see perseverance, faithfulness, and consistency from us in ways they perhaps have never seen in their lives. We visit them with no agenda, as no church sent us (even though we are Christians), and we are not trying to get them to join anything or commit to any program. They need to see that we are not transactional in our interactions with them.
2. The customers who purchase our products
They are those who love supporting a cause as they purchase healthy, fresh food that contains no added preservatives. They know that all funds above our cost are re-invested back into anti-trafficking initiatives. We strive to cultivate trust, integrity, consistency in our contacts with customers. We also share honestly about our work without betraying any names or locations, and we talk about the need to avoid objectifying those we serve in the sex industry. We also try to encourage our customers to find ways to make a difference in their own respective circles of influence. Our reputation in this regard is vital to our success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thearkbakerycafe.org
- Instagram: The Ark Bakery & Cafe
- Facebook: Boundless Mercy — Seeking Freedom for Those in the Sex Trade; https://www.facebook.com/arkbakerycafe/
Image Credits
The worried girl photo was from a free website. We took the others ourselves.