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By Root 1120 0

fools, I will say that, and their exploitation was by their own desperate decision making in the absence of other choices, unlike many of the women I met in Cambodia and Thailand who had been coerced and kidnapped. They all had children, had been abandoned in the rearing of them by boyfriends or husbands, and were starving to death. The uniformity of their stories was numbing. All became prostitutes on the advice of someone already in the business, as a last-resort means of feeding themselves and their children and paying their kids’ school fees. (Education is the Kenyan ideal: Skits and plays with happy endings invariably include a graduation. For far too many, it never happens.)

We shared information, and they spoke intimately, but without the trust and confidence I have cherished from so many others. They were hard women, and they had every reason to be.

In a narrow stairwell, I had an encounter with a customer that I have never been able to shake. Our eyes met, and neither of us relented as we held each other’s stares. There was violence in both of us: challenge, aggression, frank judgment, and contempt. I had the power of my principles, but he held power over every woman from whom he had ever coerced sex.

When we left, the women up and down the corridors covered their faces, but ironically, none of the men did. My bitter thought was: Why do women carry the shame? Why?

We could have walked to the next establishment, but the streets weren’t considered safe. It was a scuzzy fleabag hotel right out of a movie. Sammy, the owner, inherited the place from his dad in 1967 and kept up the family business. He rented rooms in fifteen-minute intervals to prostituted women who scored clients on the street below. For the cost of the room, one had to pay an extra 10 shillings for a condom, and we were stopping by to thank him for that. It was, to say the very least, an encounter about which I had very mixed feelings. I looked at Sammy’s room, painted a painful electric blue, containing his few possessions, a fridge and hot plate, and tried to picture his entire life unfolding in it, trying to summon compassion for a pimp. Not much luck. I was ready to get the hell out of there when I was told a woman on the street wanted to talk to me. I ran down the stairs to make her welcome, and the beautiful Shola came into our lives.

She looked different from the hardened women across the street. Shola was still a teenager, at least six feet tall, rail thin, and heartbreakingly gorgeous, with small, elegant features. Her skin was like velvet, and she had liquid eyes. We settled into Sammy’s sofa as I tried not to think too hard about what exactly I was sitting on (thanks, Papa Jack, for the wink-wink, watch-out-for-the-bugs look, that was real helpful). And the dear girl, in a quiet voice, told us this story:

She was from the Meru tribe and one of seven children. Her mother died in an accident when she was twelve, and when she was fifteen her father died of tuberculosis. Her father’s relatives took their land, and three of her siblings vanished. She had no idea where they were. Shola said she’d had six years of school, with a little sex education in the fifth year, but she’d had to drop out to look after her siblings once her mother died. She got pregnant at fifteen and again at eighteen, at which time her boyfriend left her. Two months pregnant, hungry, and unable to feed her toddler the increasing amounts he required, she began taking the bus to that street to sell herself between five and nine o’clock every night while a kind neighbor watched her child. She worked until her eighth month of pregnancy and was back at it a month after delivering. She said the baby had an infection in his umbilical cord and ran up a 16,000-shilling bill—the equivalent of $216 U.S.—only a part of which she could pay, and she was now even more desperate.

Kate, Papa Jack, our PSI team—all were mesmerized, horrified, as Shola spoke. She seemed so innocent and fragile and ashamed of what she was doing. She said the work was difficult at first; she was very shy