What it means to get caught in and try to quit prosititution

What you need to know:

Prostitution has been vilified so much that many wonder why some people still do it. However, not everyone in the trade joins it willingly.

My name is… let it be withheld for confidentiality. I am 22 years old. Seven years ago, when I was 15, I was happily living with my grandmother in our village in Masaka District.
I had just dropped out of school because grandmother, who was responsible for me in every way, had been able to school me only up to Primary Five and couldn’t find the money to push me further. I don’t remember meeting my parents as they died while I was still a toddler.

Coming to Kampala
So after I had dropped out of school, one day a woman came home and asked grandmother for permission to bring me to Kampala for employment. I was told this woman had grown up in our village but was now living in Kampala, and grandmother entrusted me with her to find me employment.

However, when we reached Kampala, the woman took me to Kamwokya saying she was delivering me to the restaurant where I was to work. She took me into a fenced-off house that had been divided into so many small partitions, then left me on the bed in one of the cubicles and said she was going to fetch the owner of the restaurant. That was the last I ever saw of the woman.

The next person who came to see me in the small room was a small girl my age, who told me that the work I was to do was to offer my body to men in exchange for money. She told me I was now her new roommate, and that we would use the room in turns depending on who had a customer at a particular time. We would have to each find Shs3,500 to pay the owners of the room, a daily total of Shs 7,000 –whatever I remained with every day after paying the Shs3,500 would be mine.

Giving in to prostitution
At first, I purposed to run away from this place, in fact I ran away and went walking around asking for help, only no one really helped me, and when I was very hungry after two days, I went back to the fenced house just to find something to eat. That is when the other girl really convinced me that instead of going around suffering I was better off learning her trade and then I would make a lot of money on a daily basis. I was a virgin, and it was difficult for me getting initiated in the trade, but soon I was initiated.

At first, I only wanted to make some money to transport me back to Masaka, but the girl I was living with took all the money I made in the first month and said she would pay me later. Then after three months, I got pregnant and I had to abort, and the girls who looked after me as I recuperated said I had to pay them their money. So I had to stay on. I was now even ashamed of going back home because I didn’t know what to tell them.

In the next two years, I got pregnant thrice, aborted twice and kept the child only on the third occasion because I knew the child’s father –a hawker who promised to marry me and take me away from prostitution. But after I gave birth, the hawker denied the child and said he did not know me. So for the next five years I settled proper into prostitution, as I now also had a child to look after. I rented a small room of my own in Bwaise, but now I also got addicted to all sorts of drugs, and every shilling I got I spent it on drugs and food to survive.

Trying to quit
This year, while on the street in Bwaise, a peer educator from an NGO ,came and talked to us, asking those who wanted to quit prostitution to register with her so we would be removed from the streets and be taken for vocational training and get decent jobs to do afterwards. I registered with the woman and the following week, she took me for counselling at the NGO’s offices. After four weeks of counselling, I was chosen as one of those to be trained in a vocational skill.

Now I’m staying at the vocational school, learning hairdressing and plumbing. I have totally given up the drugs and vowed to put my life straight. But my child is staying with a neighbour in Bwaise, and I have the challenge of providing food and other necessities for him. As such, I sometimes find myself thinking about escaping from the school in the evenings to go back to the streets just to get money to feed my boy. In fact, to be honest, I have done it about once every month, though I hate it with all my heart and won’t return to it once I get a job after my training. My greatest hope now is in the school helping to find me employment after training so I will be able to survive without going back to the streets.

As told to Joseph Ssemutooke Send your experiences to [email protected]