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December 1, 2003, Scotsman THE COST OF LIVING IS HIGH WHEN YOU WORK AT THE AIDS CROSSROADS Gethin Chamberlain In Lusaka CHICHI was 16 when her parents died. Her mother was killed in a road accident, and it was probably AIDS that took her father, though the family could not afford the tests to know for sure. It had been a long illness. Chichi is 20 now. Her full name is Nchichikas Namwaba, and she lived in the town of Ndola. Life was not wonderful, but neither had it yet hit rock bottom. She went to school, she fell pregnant, she returned to her classes, she managed. But the death of her parents tore her world apart. She lived with her aunt for a couple of years, continued at school and sat the exams that she hoped would set her on the path to a career as a nurse, like her mother. And then her aunt announced that she was selling the family home, the home that Chichi's parents had lived in. Chichi protested. Her aunt told her she had no respect, that girls her age should not answer back. Then she poured a pan of boiling water over the 18 -year-old girl. She still bears the scars, pale blobs of raised skin emerging from the top of her nylon shirt, and the men who pay for her body every night look at them and recoil. Chichi fled the house and went in search of her friend Marjorie. The girl told her that she should not suffer like that. She told her that they would be better off on the streets, and they went away together to the town of Chililabombwe in the copper belt. Chichi did not say goodbye to Evans, the boy she had been courting since they met years earlier in school. She did not take the baby she had at 15. She never did get her exam results, because her aunt could not or would not pay the 220,000 kwacha (GBP 27.50) the state demanded for her last term of education. Without her results, the dream of life as a nurse was gone. After a little while, she took her first client, a man in a bar. Even now, she remembers. He was a revenue officer, and he walked up to her and said he wanted sex. He asked her how much, and she was ashamed. She told him they would go somewhere later and then asked her friend what she should do. The friend told her to ask the man to buy her a drink to give her courage to go with him, but Chichi did not drink. She told the man to give her 40,000 kwacha, and from that time on she was not shy about asking for money for sex again. But it was not something she wanted to do. She felt useless, bad about herself, because she had spent so much time in school and it had ended this way. She asked herself: why me? And there was no going back. A little while later she saw Evans again, across the street, but she could not bring herself to talk to him because she knew neighbours had told him what she was doing. So Chichi and Marjorie settled into life as teenage prostitutes. They would work the nightclubs and streets, earning enough to pay for a room and a bit of food, nothing more. How much they earned depended how many men were out that night, and how much they were prepared to pay. Sometimes, they were not prepared to pay at all, especially if the girls insisted on using condoms, which they did. The girls argued that they did not know whether the men had AIDS, and the men did not know whether the girls had AIDS. They had learned about HIV at school and it made sense to them. But it did not make sense to all the men. Sometimes they were beaten, sometimes raped. One night Chichi was walking home from a nightclub, alone, heading for the guest house. Three men appeared and told her she would be having sex with one of them, but she could choose which one. If she refused, they said, they would kill her. She tried to run, but they caught her and punched her and kicked her. Then one of them raped her, anyway, and he did not use a condom. She went to the police, but they laughed at her. She was a prostitute, what did she expect? For a long time after that, Chichi worried whether the man had passed on the disease to her, but because the police had sent her away without the form she needed to be tested, she could not be sure. After five months in Chililabombwe, Chichi met a lorry driver who was passing through. He spoke to her in English about her education, took an interest in her. He asked her to go with him in his truck to Kapiri Mposhi. He promised her money to get her school results. They stayed one night, then he took her back to Lusaka, the capital city. For once, she was happy. But it was just pillow talk. Once he had what he wanted, he disappeared and Chichi was alone again. But something about Kapiri Mposhi had struck a chord in her. The town was busy, full of truckers passing through from Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo down to Zimbabwe, Botswana and east to Malawi. There was money to be made, other girls to keep her company, and the guest houses were cheaper than in Chililabombwe. She found her way back to Kapiri Mposhi, and the months went by. Insisting on a condom cost her money, but she could still make 50,000-60,000 kwacha a day. Sometimes she had a little left over from her room and food to buy the clothes and cosmetics that were the tools of her trade. But she could never save up enough to get her school results. Chichi still does not know if she has AIDS. She still cannot find a way to get her little boy back from her family. She still wants to live a normal life, go back to school, find a job, maybe educate other working girls about the dangers, about the ways to change their lives. Maybe it will happen. Maybe the disease will get her first. Maybe it already has.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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