Angry Dave And The Tel Aviv Mission
Angry Dave and the Tel Aviv Mission
Dave Fiquette is the kind of guy that would not think twice about putting a woman in a head-lock and throwing her out on the street (given the right circumstances). You could say he believes in tough love, but on the streets of Neveh Shanan, a red-light district in Tel Aviv, sometimes tough love is the only kind there is.
Fiquette runs the Door of Hope, a homeless mission in the basement of a building located in the heart of Tel Aviv’s red light district, home to 200 houses of prostitution. The men and women that take shelter here live a jungle-existence focused simply on survival. It is one thing to know the devastating statistics of Israeli women lured into drug addictions and debt bondage, both of which they must pay back with their bodies; but it is another thing to visit the Door of Hope in Tel Aviv and see it lived out before your very eyes. And it is fully another thing to live, eat, breathe, and sleep the reality every single day like Fiquette does at the Door of Hope.
When Fiquette first came to Tel Aviv, all he wanted to do was pass out a few thermoses of coffee to the city’s population of drug addicts and dealers. At that time, there was no ministry, organization, or outreach, government sponsored or otherwise, to help street women. It wasn’t long before the street women found him, knocking on his door, and asking for simple things like a bite to eat or a new pair of shoes. They didn’t even seem to notice he was a man. They were glad to nap on his couch. That was years ago.
Today, the Door of Hope shelter opens its doors every morning at 9:30 a.m. Haggard prostitutes stumble in from a night of sex-work. Here they can doff their filthy street clothes and exchange them for clean ones from the Door of Hope’s vast clothes room. The clothes room, easily the size of a modest apartment, is just one wing of the 8000 square foot basement facility that Fiquette oversees. The facility also features a kitchen with diner-style seating, and a room with about 15 beds.
The women that visit the Door of Hope are some of the most broken people on the earth. Many of them consume an average of $300 in drugs per day and service up to thirty clients. But they are still broke, still on the streets, and always a hair’s breadth away from death every single day. The Door of Hope is their only oasis. Here, a woman can sleep in an actual bed without the fear of being raped, or having her meager belongings stolen, or being murdered. It is a spartan luxury, just a notch above survival, but even these basic necessities are only made possible by the arduous labor of Fiquette and his team.
There is no door on the bathroom here, and mirrors are deliberately positioned everywhere so that every corner can be seen at all times by the Door of Hope ministry team. Heroin addicts will use the even the flimsiest privacy to shoot up, and drugs are strictly prohibited here at the Door of Hope. This may seem like little more than glorified baby sitting, but Fiquette is in the business of trying to save these women from themselves. Then again, he knows that he needs saved from himself. It happens to be the only way he can effectively reach these people.
“The secret,” Fiquette says, “is that you have to really, really know that the only difference between you and [a street prostitute] is God’s grace. For me, I understand how a person gets in a situation like that. If you can’t get to that, then you come at them from above, from a point of pride and judgment, and the women know. I have to make sure I’m not forcing an agenda. The girls need to know that I love them, but I don’t love what they do, that I’m not trying to make them into what I want them to be.”
I noticed while we talked that Fiquette would slip in and out of talking about the girls and himself. To me it was the greatest evidences that the “us” and “them” line had been obliterated in his psyche, that he so identified with their brokenness, that talking about their desperate situations inexorably segued into his: “I have a girl that came down here, 23 years old, BEAUTIFUL, face like an angel. And it’s like, if Jesus doesn’t do something, how’s she going to get out of this? Her life is over. So here’s what I preach: I say, you’ve got to surrender your life to God like you’ve surrendered your life to drugs. You can’t pray to get off drugs so that you can have the house and the kids and the perfect little life. You’ve got to say to yourself, I’m dead if I don’t turn my life over to God. It’s like when my mother killed herself and I cried out, God! I’m on the express train to hell! Dave is killing Dave! It’s not just that I have a problem; I am the problem.” That last part is his mantra, and if he were a motivational speaker, it might make a great title to a book. But the only person he’s trying to motivate is himself. He’s just trying to make it through today.
Fiquette has learned to get gut wrenchingly raw with God. It’s the only way he has found to keep a shred of sanity when he is faced with the senseless waste of body and soul that he encounters in his ministry. The fact is, he’s angry, and he doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s angry.
“In a lot of ways I think I am bitter,” he said when I asked how he keeps his heart alive. A large part of the emotional toll taken by this work is just feeling the wearisome ire of spirit and soul. “I have to weigh my anger a lot and ask, is this godly anger or not? I can get so bitter at God, like, why are you letting these people die? And you know what, this is going to sound funny, but I had to realize that God watches me use the toilet. Am I hiding anything from him? Is it like he doesn’t know what’s in my head and heart? I’ve learned to get real with God.” For Fiquette, being in touch with his own anger and frustration keeps the overwhelming task of helping these broken women in fresh perspective. “I’ve learned to see that if I can’t fix myself, I’m not fixing the girls. Dave’s too much for Dave, so if I’m not my problem, then the girls aren’t my problem. What weighs down the professionals is the fact that professional skills don’t overcome the kingdom of darkness. It’s like, my mother had a 152 point I.Q., and went to all the best psychologists, and guess what? She killed herself.” He makes a sound like a game show buzzer. “That doesn’t work.”
Fiquette finds that many Christians are predisposed to what he calls a humanitarian mindset. What he means is that Christians approach social justice issues with a simplistic framework: victims and bad guys. Fiquette, on the other hand, subscribes to more of a hand-to-hand combat style of orthodoxy, something of the “cling to the old rugged cross “ variety . For him, a humanitarian mindset misses the point that all have fallen short and are consequently in danger of hell. But it’s more than a theological quibble to him because it’s only in the unadulterated gospel message of grace that he finds real power to deliver women from their very dangerous, very earthly problems.
“When people think of a pimp, they usually want to shoot him up like in a Lethal Weapon movie or something. I can’t look at him that way; I have to look at the pimp and see that he’s just as much of a victim as the girl he’s prostituting. It says in Ephesians, ‘we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood,’ but people come down here and look at all the flesh and blood and lose track of the greater problem behind it all.” Which is another way of saying that Fiquette picks his battles, and the ones he picks he fights with prayer. He doesn’t inject the message of Jesus into every ladle of soup, or hand out tracks with every pair of pants (which would be a blatant infringement of Israel’s strict laws against proselytizing). Instead, he waits. He listens. He prays. He loves. And when a girl opens the door, he tells her the truth and gives her a Gospel of repentance.
Fiquette has found that when Christians give the wrong message to a hurting woman, they can actually ruin her chances of finding the real help that Jesus offers.
“I’ll give you an example. I had a girl named Karen (not her real name) at the Door of Hope. She was a Jewish girl from California who died on the streets at just 27 years old. I had a chance before she died to tell her about Jesus, and you want to know what she said to me? She said, ‘I’ve already done that.’ She said, ‘When I was in California, I sat in a circle of people who said that all I needed to do was pray a prayer; I invited Jesus into my life but here I am, 8 years later, and I’m still shooting heroin into my neck.’ Now she’s dead. I could never get the Gospel through to her.” Fiquette blames the humanitarian-gospel. “Believers just present Jesus like some big social worker, like a McDonald’s drive thru Big Mac with a convenient solution to every problem. And then they come here and get angry about the pimps. We can’t take our cues from the media and from politicians and join their cause and say, ‘Poor little victim! let’s rescue her!’ We’ve got to realize that the pimps, the politicians, and the prostitutes– they’ll all spend eternity in Hell. The only difference is one or the other will be a little more miserable here before they die.”
A common expression of a humanitarian mindset is a propensity to try and make distinction between a trafficking victim and an ordinary prostitute. In Fiquette’s world, that is too narrow of a distinction, one that doesn’t take into account the common patterns of abuse and manipulation suffered by women in a broad spectrum of sexual exploitation. From what he’s seen, every woman in prostitution is enslaved in some way.
“No woman wants to do this,” he said. “It’s not in the build of a woman. Woman are emotionally stimulated sexually, verses men who are stimulated visually. This lifestyle is automatically against her nature. Think of the worst kind of scene in a movie for women. It’s not blood and guts. It’s a rape scene. And these women are living that every day.” Fiquette explained to me how a woman in Tel Aviv typically gets into prostitution: her story almost always starts with a broken family; her sex-life almost always begins when she is raped as a little girl by a father or brother. A woman that emerges from her childhood with that kind of baggage is a woman who believes she is destined to be used, that she is nothing more than a piece of meat. What follows is further destructive behavior, and a series of bad choices in relationships. She gets into drugs, and then gets raped by her boyfriends (who can be as addicting as the drugs). While most of the women that Fiquette deals with on a regular basis are on drugs, drugs are not always the catalyst for crisis. The crisis could be she that she needs to pay rent, or that her boyfriend is short on cash and she wants to help. Of course, she finds that said “boyfriend” is more than happy to pimp her out. Thus begins her life of street prostitution. This lifestyle so predictable and echoed so many times in the stories of so many women, that it obfuscates the distinction between a woman selling her body by choice verses another forced to sell her body. These women are slaves as much as any human trafficking victim.
Fiquette believes he’s walking out simple gospel obedience in this very complex context, but beyond even that, he believes he’s being Jesus to them. He’s living out the love of Jesus day by day. But often that doesn’t look the way people think it should.
“Most christians have a pretty mild picture of Jesus in their head, sort of a bearded woman. They picture a man so effeminate that the sheep standing nearby looks vicious compared to him. But when you come down here, all you find is Angry Dave in the midst of the insanity, not even sure how he’s alive.” He said to me, “Look man, this isn’t Mary Poppins stuff. These women are street criminals. They steal. They fight. Like, if a girl starts a fight, I have to drag her up the stairs in a headlock and throw her back out on the street. Now, some people look at that and ask is that Jesus? “ Of course its a valid question, but it’s not one that can be answered from the spectator’s vantage point. And that’s not to say that his methodology cannot be criticized. But the criticisms seem petty in light of Fiquette’s regimented lifestyle, waking at 4 a.m., praying for two hours with his team every day before they even open the doors, and a fierce commitment to spending time in the word to maintain his sanity.
But even that level of insanity pales in comparison to what Fiquette and the Door of Hope staff must do every single evening at 6 p.m.: wake the sleeping women and send them back out onto the street, back to their drug habit, back to the clients, back to the very real possibility that they will never see them alive again. If the shelter had more money, and more team members, it could maybe stay open 24/7. But even though the Door of Hope lacks sufficient funding and zealous volunteers, it does not lack heart. At closing time, you suddenly see why Fiquette is angry: he is heart broken. He is a man who faces his limitations each and every day. He wants to do more, but he can’t. All he can do is pray.
When I asked Fiquette how we could pray for him and the Door of Hope, he gave a sobering answer: “You can pray as if a terrorist had taken you captive and you’re his hostage. There’s a difference when you pray, O God, please let Mary get an A on the test, or please help me pick the right flowers for the party, verses if a terrorist is threatening to blow you up. Pray for us that way.”
