Girls Like Us (30 page)

The date that Harold doesn’t meet is the one I’m most infatuated with. Sam lives in the building behind mine, and is the boy epitome of my feelings about the airbase and its barbecues and lawns. My desire for a normal, suburban family experience translates into the desire for the type of normal teenage relationship that I never had. We don’t have a lot in common and most of the time we talk awkwardly about nothing, but I don’t care. Our dating life is relatively chaste and boring, which I love. We watch movies, sometimes at his house till his mother and father come home and make it clear that I need to leave. Sam goes to the prom with another girl that he’s seeing and I’m crushed. It’s hard for me to accept that I’ll never recapture my teenage years, and I don’t speak to him for several weeks. I watch him play football from afar and pine away in teenage-girl fashion, writing his name all over my notebook.

Just before I leave, having kissed and made up, Sam and I take a trip to Mainz and walk along the river. It feels fitting to be back in Mainz where so many terrible things happened to me, but this time with my safe and sometimes boring crush. He takes me to McDonald’s for my good-bye dinner and the thrill of a “teenage” relationship is beginning to wear off. We pose arms wrapped around each other and ask a passerby to take a picture. I’m disappointed several weeks later when I discover that the picture doesn’t come out, but even without the photographic evidence, the image is clear in my mind, me in my pink and white floral dress, him in his ever-present uniform of black T-shirt and jeans, the backdrop of the Rhine at dusk behind us.

I know that I’m about to embark on a whole new chapter and that I won’t ever really come home again, not to this time and place. But I’m ready. Bernadette, Harold, Dr. Hall, Sonia, my pastors, the folks at church, Samantha, Cheryl, and even Sam have given me a sense of hope and a sense of self. They’ve been my family, the community where I’ve been able to hide and heal, at least enough to keep moving forward. On a small airbase in Germany they’ve accomplished a miracle. They’ve loved me back to life.

In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s oft-cited Hierarchy of Needs theory, the need for social connection, for community and belonging, are a critical part of any individual’s well-being and development. Once the initial needs for shelter, food, resources, and safety have been met, there remains a deep human need for friendship and family, and beyond that, for competence, mastery, and respect for and by others. I hadn’t heard of Maslow’s theories until I came to New York and studied Pysch 101 in college. Yet I understood that the love and support from the adults around me, the total acceptance and physical affection from my little kids, the ability to try new things and develop skills by volunteering and working, had enabled me to begin my healing process and had left me with a new sense of myself and my abilities.

Most girls, though, aren’t fortunate enough to have a sleepy little military base replete with a built-in community to help with the recovery process. They’re often still in the same communities, perhaps just a few blocks away from where they were first trafficked, often dealing with many of the same challenges that made them so vulnerable in the first place.

Trafficked girls are also getting many of their needs met in the life, albeit in the most distorted and exploitative fashion. In addition to the basic needs for sustenance and survival, pimps provide a sense of belonging to a family. Being good at making money feels like a level of competence and mastery, and having daily attention from johns can feel like a boost to your self-esteem, even though it’s based solely on your ability to provide sex. If you’re going to take something away, you have to replace it with something else. Trafficked and sexually exploited girls and young women need a place to hide and heal, but it is not enough to solely provide for their basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. As I began to create GEMS, I understood that they also need a place where they could feel like they belonged, where they could feel strong and empowered, a place where they could feel loved and valued, even as the struggles remained right outside the door.

Exploited girls need the opportunity to develop new skills, to create a new sense of self. If your entire sense of who you are has been shaped by the sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation that you’ve experienced, it’s tough to begin to learn to see yourself in a new way. For girls and young women who’ve felt “good” only at being in the life, the opportunity to learn new skills and develop hidden talents, whether it’s poetry or art or cooking or boxing or finding out that they’re a great listener, a good friend, or a supportive peer, can begin to reshape and redefine who they see themselves as.

Yet groups and workshops alone can’t support the healing that girls need. People connect to people, not programs. In an effort to develop appropriate boundaries in programs and organizations, we have often shied away from the concept of love as a tool for healing and recovery, yet the human need for appropriate, unconditional love to help in the healing process cannot be ignored. When girls talk about what has made a difference for them, they talk about “that judge who was mad nice,” “my counselor who was like my second best friend,” or “staff who paid attention to me,” not a specific type of clinical therapy or a certain activity that they engaged in at a program. While these services and opportunities are important, they’re not what initially gets girls walking through the door and coming back again and again. When their strongest connection to another person, their pimp, is removed, they need to feel connected to someone else. During this scary time, having someone to call at 3 a.m., having friends who have gone through the same thing, and ultimately feeling loved can help to alleviate some of the pain and fear of the recovery process.

Many girls are reluctant initially to come to GEMS when they learn that it’s an all-women/girls program. Girls under the control of a pimp have been ruled with a divide-and-conquer model. Everyone competing for the same crumbs of affection and attention is bound to breed intense jealousy and competition, so girls in the life tend to view each other as threats and rivals, which is their pimp’s goal anyway. Add to these experiences the already internalized messages of sexism and stereotypes about women and girls—
They’re mad grimy/shady
,
You can’t trust females
,
They’ll steal your man
—that many girls grow up believing and it makes it difficult for girls to have genuine and open relationships with other girls. Yet while I’ve seen my share of fights, clothes stealing, and the occasional boyfriend “stealing” (the girls rarely blame the boys for the cheating), overall I’ve been moved by the relationships and friendships that have developed at GEMS and overwhelmingly impressed by the way that the girls support and look out for one another.

The
Cheers
theme song, while having the annoying ability to get stuck in your head after just hearing a few bars, actually captures the human need for belonging, community, and understanding in a far more succinct way than any psychologist has ever been able to do:

You wanna go, / Where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. / You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same.

Isn’t that pretty much what everyone wants and needs? A place where you feel like you matter, a place where people understand you, a place where you’re surrounded by peers?

For sexually exploited girls who often don’t have the family structure or support that may be able to provide this sense of community, and for whom this void on some level has been filled by the sense of “belonging” to a pimp, a new type of support system is essential.

There’s a host of girls excitedly unwrapping the decorations and beginning to unfold the silver plastic Christmas tree. I’m digging in the decorations box for all our nice decorations, knowing full well that within an hour, every single bauble or piece of tinsel, whether it matches our pink-and-silver color scheme or not, will be crowding the tree. I remind myself not to care that the GEMS tree will look tacky; the point of this exercise is not to indulge my whims but to make sure the girls have a good time. As I’m digging in the jumble of fairy lights and plastic baubles, I see the handmade stars that a staff member who was feeling creative had made several years ago with girls’ names and a cutout Polaroid attached to each.

“Ha!” I dangle the stars and the girls pay attention.

“Am I there?”

“Where am I?”

“Ay yo, look at Nadia when she was mad young.”

The girls are swapping around the star photos, cracking jokes on each other, trying to remember girls from two and three years ago. The newer girls are trying to get in on the excitement, too. “Who’s this one?” “Where’s she at now?”

I pull one from the box and my heart stops. It’s a picture of Falicia, a GEMS girl who had passed away a few months before from AIDS. Her death at twenty-four had rocked the GEMS community. Her funeral, held by a family who barely knew her, was awful, but we’d held our own memorial service at GEMS that had been funny and beautiful and sad, and ultimately cathartic. Many of the girls had been frightened about their own HIV status, especially those who were already positive. Seeing their peer pass away so young, in 2007, of AIDS, was surreal for them, and there were a lot of difficult conversations with scared teenage girls who were now confronted with the reality of their own mortality. Out of her passing, however, had come a new determination from some of the girls to speak publicly about their status. Just a few weeks earlier the youth outreach team had organized an HIV/AIDS awareness week that had been a huge success, resulting in many more members getting on-site testing. We had honored her memory and her life in every way we knew how to, and I was proud of the girls for the way they’d rallied and worked to find something good come out of the tragedy.

Despite this, seeing her picture on the star throws me. All smiles, she is wearing my wool poncho that had been a bad impulse buy but looked cute on her. All the memories and all the sadness come rushing back. I remind myself that we were her home for a long time, and that she knew that she was loved. I remember how we’d all stood outside after the GEMS memorial, prayed, and together released twenty-four pink (her favorite color) balloons into the air. We’d watched for as long as we could see them, crossing the street to watch them float up, become tiny little dots, and finally disappear into the cloudless August sky. I turn my head away from the girls for a second and wipe my eyes. Jasmine hugs me and I know she misses her friend, too. We finish trimming the tree with Falicia’s star perched crookedly on top.

The decorating fever exhausted, the girls settle on the couch. I treasure these moments, the noncrying, noncrisis, chill-out moments when I can simply enjoy them. The conversation soon becomes a GEMS reminiscing session. Talking about the old days is a favorite pastime. “Remember when Rachel walked into the cabinet and fell over and cut her nose wide open and there was mad blood everywhere!”

“Uh, thank you, people. I still have a scar from that!” This does little to quieten the laughter. Now we’re on GEMS accidents. In a little while it’ll be GEMS fights, and then stories about the GEMSmobile, my old piece-of-crap car that has a series of stories and jokes all to itself. Just as many of the girls have grown up here, so have I. I was twenty-three years old when I began GEMS and have spent more hours in this office, many of them on this very couch, than I’ve probably spent anywhere else.

“Rachel, ’member when Sophia sat on a pair of scissors and they went all the way through her thigh and she just pulled them out?”

“How could I ever forget that? I was so freaked-out. I had to drive her to the hospital, singing Jay-Z songs all the way cos that was the only thing that would keep her calm.” I pantomime driving and rapping with a bleeding Sophia in the back. The girls are laughing hysterically. They can go on like this for hours. As can I.

My head is full with eleven years’ worth of memories involving hundreds and hundreds of girls. It’s important to tell these stories so the girls feel like they’re a part of history. One of the things I had to learn for myself and have tried to pass on is that you may not be able to choose your family of origin but you can choose your family of creation. We’ve created our own little family at GEMS with memories and traditions and rituals. For some girls, GEMS may be something that they just need for a season as they create their own families and support systems, a bridge to tide them over when they’re in pain and as they slowly emerge as young women. For others, it may remain a constant over the years, a place that always feels like home, no matter how long they’ve been gone.

One of my favorite things about GEMS at any time of year, but especially at the holidays, is that you never know who’s going to walk through the door. Girls who’ve been gone for years will show up for mac ’n’ cheese and the opportunity to relax and catch up with their peers. Girls bring their children, the ever-expanding GEMS extended family of babies, toddlers, and school-age kids, many of whom have literally grown up at GEMS. These kids are now “play cousins” who over the years play together at events and barbecues as their mothers reminisce about the “good old days.” At least once a week, there are the screams of “Oh my God,” “Look who’s here!” and “Ay yo, Rachel—come see who it is!” Girls pretend to look embarrassed by the attention, but they’re obviously pleased to be remembered, to be welcomed. We’ve become the
Cheers
of trafficked girls, the place where everyone’s always glad you came.

I’m sitting on the couch, in the middle of an interview with a reporter, when a young woman walks in. She stands by the door, looking at me expectantly. It takes a few seconds to recognize this beautiful young woman as the gangly girl who has been gone for so long. Over the years, I’ve heard that she’s being trafficked to various cities, that she’s doing OK, that she’s doing badly. I’ve wondered for a long time when and if she’ll ever break free. Looking at her, I can tell that she’s back for real, that she’s left him and left the life. Tears roll down my cheeks. The prodigal daughter has returned and while we don’t throw her a huge feast, we do greet her with a lot of excitement and smother her with hugs. Later I wonder if the reporter thinks we’ve staged this little reunion. After all, it is quite miraculous for a girl who came to GEMS when she was twelve years old to return at twenty.