All That Is Bitter and Sweet (24 page)
Once the crowd was big enough, it was bait and switch. The PSI youth team broke into one of their fabulous, charismatic, powerful skits that has many plots but one message: HIV/AIDS kills, and prevention is fundamental to staying alive and healthy. When the skit was over, the team capitalized on the crowd’s thrall and began a question-and-answer session about HIV/AIDS. One young woman in the audience asked whether or not you could get HIV from mosquitoes (FYI, you can’t)—a sadly revealing mix-up with another big killer around here: malaria, a disease PSI also had innovative programs to prevent and treat. AIDS had been ravaging Kenya for more than twenty years, but there was still so much to learn.
We poked around the slum, waving, saying hi in bad Swahili, and admiring tiny, colorful shops. Fifty percent of Kenyans make their living through agriculture, mostly subsistence farming, but in cities and slums they survive by scavenging and selling little things in the informal economy: onions, perhaps, or secondhand shoes (or a single shoe), or by sharpening knives. There are small stands and makeshift businesses everywhere, announced on crude but colorful painted signs, and I loved paying effusive compliments to the owners.
I was thrilled to see how many young people in Huruma knew about “Chill,” a wildly popular social marketing campaign. It used fun, hip-hop sounds in commercials to create an upbeat and empowering message about delaying the first sexual experience—or reclaiming abstinence if one had already been sexually active. It was aimed at ten-to-fourteen-year-old children—who are just about to make the choices that would affect the rest of their lives and are often being pressured to do so. Wherever we made the “Chill” hand sign to young people—it looks like a “V” for victory or a peace sign—the kids cheered and flashed it back at us. Abstinence has become cool. The kids join Chill clubs in school, where the code word is
Nimechill
—Swahili slang for “I Am Abstaining.”
We walked up a flight of crooked, decaying stairs in a cement-block building to visit the flat of Abiud, one of our peer educators. He unlocked a bright green door and ushered us into a six-by-eight-foot room with a spigot and squat hole toilet on his floor. By Huruma standards, Abiud lived like a king; he had the entire place to himself, whereas most such rooms accommodated entire families. He had a bed off the floor, some stereo equipment, knickknacks, soccer posters, and a David Beckham T-shirt for decoration, along with scores of motivational and reflective quotations placed everywhere. His rent was $10 a month, which he paid with his PSI earnings. I sat on his bed with my arm around him, looking at his photo album, telling him how proud I was of him and to keep up the good work. He was twenty-one, HIV-positive, trained to give his testimonial to others to help educate and protect them. For his work he was given nutritional supplements, some health care, counseling, and support. Like other peer educators I met in Kenya, Abiud told me PSI had saved his life, given him an identity, and made him useful. We might not be able to save everybody, but we could make a difference in the life of this one young man, and he, in turn, was helping to save others.
Our next stop was a voluntary counseling and testing center, one of those vibrant storefront gathering places full of motivated, empowered locals who bring the gospel of medically accurate sex education, reproductive health, and the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to young and at-risk people. There were posters on the walls such as “A Human Being’s Sexual Bill of Rights,” including the right to know about your body, the right to have sex only with whom you choose and when you choose, and the right to be protected from disease. The centers also provide a forum to dispel dangerous rumors and misinformation about the virus. For example, many believe that it’s simply not possible for people who go to church to be infected with HIV. This myth fills coffins faster than small businesses responding to the demand can construct them.
Misinformation, however, is only fuel on the fire of the AIDS crisis in Kenya. The root cause of the HIV problem here is gender inequality and violence against girls and women. The sexual objectification of women leads to ongoing inequities in education, economic, property, and legal disempowerment, which in turn, of course, keep women and their children stuck in the violence of poverty. For me, the most fundamental expression of this poverty is a woman’s inability to negotiate, much less have control over, her own sexuality and fertility.
In Kenya, this inequity can been seen in cultural practices such as wife inheritance (a woman being required, upon her husband’s death—often from AIDS-related causes—to become her brother-in-law’s wife) or in the lack of economic opportunity for women, which leads to transactional sex—which is also often cross-generational sex, a ubiquitous phenomenon here. Sometimes it’s so simple as to cut like a knife: In the Lake Victoria region, the men fish, and the women sell the fish, and the men insist on sex in exchange for giving them the fish to sell. Cross-generational sex occurs when an older man uses his relative status and power to coerce a girl into sexual acts, sometimes in exchange for subsistence items she needs for her family or herself, such as a liter of fuel, or for aspirational consumer goods, such as minutes for a mobile phone card. Infuriatingly, there are documented cases of teachers demanding cross-generational sex from girls to permit them to remain in the classroom or to record accurate grades on their schoolwork. In such asymmetrical power relations, girls and women cannot negotiate condom use—much less abstain—and are totally vulnerable to the virus, pregnancy, and related negative cascade of poor life outcomes.
As grim as it can be here, there are some faint rays of hope. Some of the Protestant churches—a growing force in Kenya—have been backing away from their unrealistic stance on condom use. The night I arrived in Nairobi, the All Africa Conference of Churches was wrapping up a three-day-long HIV/AIDS conference. This ecumenical fellowship, representing more than 140 million Christians in thirty-nine African countries, had been slow to awaken to the reality of AIDS and had even contributed to the stigmatization of sufferers. But all that was changing. I felt very comfortable speaking at the conference. I am always most at home with people of faith and am heartened by talking about the HIV emergency in such a setting, because only when we all believe and accept the intrinsic worth of each and every person on this earth will we have the full motivation needed to stop the disaster of HIV/AIDS. And churches are accepting that they have to preach from the pulpit the truth about how HIV is transmitted and that they have to address within their faith the many social ills that contribute so mightily to HIV’s rampant devastation of Africa. I believe an effective wave of the future is faith-based organizations working with public health NGOs. Together we have the ability to reach, empower, and save tens of millions of lives, unleashing human capital that can then focus on lifting their societies out of poverty.
There were some great spirituals sung at the conference, too, such as “We Shall Overcome,” which moved me to tears, reminding me that Monday was Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. And have no doubt about it: This is the civil rights movement of our time.
As if our day hadn’t already been full, later that evening we visited three brothels. In between, I had collapsed from fatigue born of incredible heat, noxious pollution, traffic, noise, and the intense throbbing of 2.7 million difficult lives. My nap had the dual purpose of essential rest and psychological relief, knocking me out so my unconscious could have some time to reset and fortify itself for the assault on dignity and humanity that is a brothel. I woke up calm and ready.
First we parked on a crowded, heaving street lined with electronics shops, across from a run-down, five-story tenement in a broken-up, tough part of town. Every now and then my view of the tenement was interrupted by tricked-out buses ripping by, lit up with what I am sure were meant to be festive lights and decorations that only seemed sad and tawdry to me; the back of the buses had crudely hand-painted Hollywood cartoon figures plastered on them.
Entering the brothel, I felt like Eurydice being led into Hades. The halls were completely dark, apparently because the electric bill was rarely paid, and women worked with one candle per room, adding to the frightening, macabre nature of the scene. As soon as we entered, the women started screeching and throwing plastic bottles at us. They thought we were reporters, like the ones from the national TV news station who had recently done a story on this brothel. Many of the women’s secret lives as prostitutes had been exposed to their families, and they were still shamed and furious about it. Papa Jack and our escort finally calmed everybody down and assured them we did not have cameras with us, that we were there simply to talk with them about their reproductive health.
We were allowed to go deeper into the brothel, but the atmosphere was tense and explosive for the duration of our visit. The place was revolting. Even in the darkness we could see green slime on the walls of the corridors that led to thirty small dorm-style rooms. Dozens of women came every day to pay 150 shillings (less than $2 U.S.) for the use of a filthy mattress on a lopsided spring frame, separated from the other two or three beds in the room by threadbare sheets strung from ropes. They sat on chairs in the hallways, waiting for clients, of which, based on what I saw firsthand, there was no shortage. This was different from my experience in Asia, where the pimps and madams kept business away during my visits—or was that Papa Jack at the door, turning clients away as I bonded with the women? Here, business was going on as usual the entire time, with the sound and sights of crude sexual couplings all around us illuminated by flickering candlelight.
Kate and I finally gathered up about eight women to sit down with us in one room, while Papa Jack stood guard at the door. Outside we could hear scuffling and yelling. Papa Jack later told me that the desperate women would actually assault customers as they came in, competing with one another, trying to force the men onto their beds, extracting money out of them if they were successful in unzipping their pants. Sometimes the men would simply pay the aggressor 100 shillings to get rid of her.
The women we interviewed were a fierce, proud lot. Their dreams were humble and realistic by our standards yet remained distantly out of reach for them: to be a cook, own a small hotel, receive computer training, become a hairdresser. But the bus fare from home to town was more than a day’s wages doing hair. Even if they could access training for these dream jobs, they could not afford to live. They were admittedly illiterate, but they were no 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: