A Rose and a Thorny Situation

She called to me with a shy smile from outside the maternity where I was sitting with women waiting to be screened for cervical cancer last October. I put down my papers and joined her outside, where Patrick and some of the doctors from peacecare were loading up a hospital car to go do a screening in a neighboring village. She pointed at Pat and Dr. Dykens, “Who are those men?” she asked with a lilting Nigerian accent.

“That’s my husband,” I said, quite defensively, thinking she was looking for a potential client.

She shook her head and pulled me out of view of the other girls who were waiting for their required monthly checkups. “My name is Rose. I’m looking for someone who can help me. I thought maybe those white men…I am tired. I don’t want to do this work, I don’t want to be in this country.” She pulled out her identity card from her wallet. It was from Mali. She pointed to the occupation: hairdresser. “I did not come here to do this work. Hairdresser is what they told me. I’m looking for someone to help me find other work.”

I looked her in the eyes and asked a novice question: “Were you trafficked here?”

She shushed me and pulled me even farther away. “Don’t use that word. I just need help. I’ll do anything, cooking, cleaning, plaiting hair. I just don’t want to be here.”

I felt hit by a ton of bricks. This was by no means my first interaction with a sex worker (known around here as les nigeriennes,or keme naani (the malinnke for 2000—the price ($4), or, at the hospital, or PS for professionelles du sexe). I had seen them often in the big gold mining sites and in Saraya—they stand out as the only women who wear pants and makeup. During my first afternoon interpreting for a midwife on sex worker consultation day, I had to tell one girl she was pregnant and miscarrying and another that she had HIV. When Saraya’s first bar had opened, just one week prior, the owner for some reason thought that the best way to get the party started would be to truck in sex workers from Kharakhena. What resulted was one of the most bizarre scenes of my Peace Corps service: 20 prostitutes dancing provocatively while hundreds of children from Saraya looked in from the street in utter shock and amazement.

This time, however, was the first that I had been directly approached for help. I had suspected that many of them were trafficked, but here was someone who really had been and was reaching out to me. I felt overwhelmed with the responsibility of that. I gave her my number and said I would look into ways to help her. At my hut that evening, I scoured the internet for information on how to help a woman trafficked into the sex trade. I went to the websites of all the major organizations: International Justice Mission, Half the Sky. My heart beating, I clicked on the “resources” tab, only to find links to things like “Start an advocacy organization at your church”. There were absolutely no resources for people in a situation where a real person needed help. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so hopeless.

Over the next few days, I called and emailed everyone I could think of that could give me some guidance and got almost nothing concrete—email contacts that bounced back, links to organizations that worked in Nigeria but had nothing to do with Senegal. Finally, Pat came back from another cervical cancer screening in Khossanto, one of the biggest gold mining zones, where he had explained the situation to the head nurse and had been given a lead: an organization called La Lumière that had received a contract from the UN to work with trafficked girls in southeastern Senegal. It took me quite a while to track down a legitimate phone number for the organization, and in the mean time, I came back to my hut one night to find Rose waiting under my shade structure. I hadn’t been able to be in touch with her at all, and I had begun to worry that all of my searching for help for her wouldn’t every work out if I didn’t see her again.

To be honest, it freaked me out to have her seen at my house. She had clearly had to ask around to find it, and it was a bit scary to know that people might suspect I was helping her. Those who traffic women aren’t the nicest people, and I didn’t want my home involved. Pat had travelled to Thies, and I started having dreams that pimps had come to my house. I told her about the research I had done and about La Lumiere and started to learn a little more about her. She had only been in Senegal for about 2 months after having first been brought to Mali. She was afraid to go back to Nigeria without being able to bring money home to her family and wanted to find a non-prostitution job anywhere else.

I eventually got ahold of La Lumière’s office in Tambacounda, and they referred me to a guy named Francis who could help her out. They explained that they had a center in Kedougou where they could bring the girls and help them get their paperwork sorted out to bring them back to Nigeria. Once they were back, the program would fund them to get job training. It seemed like a really sweet deal. I called Francis to verify, and he started yelling in English, “Where are you? I can come and get you!” I had to explain to him that I was not in danger and that I wasn’t even with Rose. There is no cell phone service in Kharakhena where she was living, so it was just a waiting game for her to come to Saraya so we could talk.

In the mean time, I went to a friend’s village to help with a youth empowerment event and forgot my phone in Kedougou. Another volunteer who knew the story explained the opportunity to her when she eventually called, and through a ridiculous sequence of communications, it was decided that Rose would come into Kedougou the following day. I got back to Kedougou and confirmed the plan with Francis, who I had met along with Peace Corps’ safety and security advisor. During that meeting, he had said that center was not available but that he would find lodging.

When Rose called me to tell me she was on the way, I felt so triumphant. We were actually helping her! I called Francis to let him know, and he informed me that a) he was in Tambacounda (four hours away) and couldn’t help her that day, and b) that I would have to figure out lodging for her for the several weeks she would stay in Kedougou. My euphoria dissolved instantly. Things had just gotten shady.

Together with Pat and some other volunteers, we decided that we could finance her lodging for the night while we figured out what the heck was going on. We then called Francis back to demand that he meet with us as soon as he arrived in Kedougou that evening. Pat and I met Rose at the garage and took a taxi with her to a campement that we thought would be a quiet and out of the way place. That preconception was based on the week last year when Peace Corps rented out the entire campement for our youth camp. It turned out that on all the other weeks of the year, it sports a happening bar with numerous Nigerian prostitutes. So much for getting away from that environment.

We awkwardly got a room with her and sat inside (Pat propped the door open with a chair to indicate that there was no funny business going on). We sat and sat and sat, waiting for Francis. It got more and more uncomfortable and stressful. First, we realized that she had not understood that the plan was for her to work with the embassy and go back to Nigeria.  She was absolutely convinced that if she went back, then the government would publicly shame her and show her picture in the newspapers and on TV. She couldn’t bear for her family to know that she had been a prostitute. We tried to assure her that this would not happen, that she didn’t even have to go back to her family until she had gone through job training and made some money. But she was freaking out. She told a story of a time when she was still in Mali, where people from the Nigerian embassy had come looking for girls who had been trafficked, and they all ran out into the bush to hide, but a young girl got caught. It was this girl who had told them about the media exposure. I still couldn’t believe that could be true and tried to reassure, but really, what do I know about how the Nigerian government treats returned trafficked women. I would think that the UN’s involvement would provide some protection though…right? We also learned that she had actually paid off her madame and was free to leave, which was a huge relief regarding our own safety. She still had been quite secretive when she left Kharakhena though.

Finally Francis came. It turned out that he wasn’t even an actual employee of La Lumière but rather just the president of the local Nigerian Association. We were all quite suspicious of his constantly changing story, but Rose agreed to stay (and had a friend she could stay with so that Pat and I wouldn’t have to foot the bill) to hear him out. We had to go back to site, and we left Kedougou praying that it would all work out.

Several days later, Rose called and said she was still in Kedougou and that Francis was a great deceiver. The next time I came into the regional capital, I found myself in a bedroom with four sex workers as they got ready for the night. Rose handed me her phone, which she had set up to play a French version of Alvin and the Chipmunks to entertain me. As she got ready, she told me that she had heard that there was an opportunity for girls to go to Kuwait to get jobs cleaning houses and that’s what she was going to try to do. I begged her to be careful. It sounded like a similar opportunity as the one that had brought her here.

In the end, she just went back to Kharakhena. All that drama, and she is where she started. I, however, ended up more confused, less naïve, and, for a while, pretty convinced that the world was a horrible place.

Around the time I was feeling that way, I came across this prayer from Ted Loder’s collection Guerrillas of Grace:

Sometimes, God, it just seems to be too much: too much violence, too much fear; too much of demands and problems; too much of broken dreams and broken lives; too much of war and slums and dying; too much of greed and squishy fatness and the sounds of people devouring each other and the earth; too much of stale routines and quarrels, unpaid bills and dead ends; too much of words lobbed in to explode and leaving shredded hearts and lacerated souls; too much of turned-away backs and cowardly silence, fiery rage and the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth.

Sometimes the very air seems scorched by threats and rejection and decay until there is nothing but to inhale pain and exhale confusion. Too much of darkness, God, too much of cruelty and selfishness and indifference … Too much, God, too much, too bloody, bruising, brain-washing much. 

Or is it too little, too little of compassion, too little of courage, of daring, of persistence, of sacrifice; too little of music and laughter and celebration.

 A while ago, I wrote and received a grant to enhance Saraya’s existing condom distribution network to better target sex workers. The project was put on hold because of my crazy schedule and the maternity leave of the midwife who I was going to be working with. We finally started it up in January, and the last few months have been crammed with training bartenders (the primary lodgers of the sex workers to distribute condoms) and doing health and lifeskills talks with sex workers in the big gold mining sites and in Saraya as they wait for their monthly checkups.  Overall it has been a really positive experience. Fatou, the head midwife, said that after we did a talk on STIs, the girls have been more willing to let the midwives actually examine them, which felt like a huge victory. It’s encouraging to know, after my failed attempt to make a difference in Rose’s life, that it’s not impossible to positively impact these girls. It’s a crazy world we live in, with a lot of messed up things. But there is always room for the little positive things that make things just a little messed up. I hope.