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Friday 29 December 2017

Sex workers: The Un-cooperative. By Anistasia James

When we first met the 30 female sex workers, they sat on school benches, facing us, they looked tired, worn and without hope.

We introduced ourselves to the women:
“Mwiriwe nitwa Ani, Amakuru?”
Good afternoon, my name is Ani. How are you?
They responded in unison,
“Mwiriwe, ni meza”
Ni meza meaning “I am fine”.

In my mind, I questioned their response, are they fine?
Their response is robotic, rehearsed, as if they could not say they were anything but fine.
Only moments later, once we began to discuss the cohesiveness of their cooperative, their reasons for formation, and the daily issues they were facing as sex workers, it became all too apparent that they were indeed, not fine. 
Their cooperative aimed to start production of laundry soap, liquid body soap and Vaseline based lotion, the latter otherwise known as the “cure-all”, which is used on your body, hair, and to treat any skin problems.
Movit, one of the most popular brands of Vaseline or ‘cure-all’s’ in Rwanda. 

At our first meeting, like many to follow, the silence from the women quickly came to an end. The silence was always ended upon the roaring scream of “amafaranga”, meaning money, we need money. Poverty is the cause and we hope setting up a cooperative will be the solution.

Unfortunately, the lack of team cohesion, their daily stressful and violent professions and inevitable, admitted abuse of substances causes a raucous at every meeting. For the first and for many to follow, I removed one of the women’s vulnerable babies from the hostile environment to quieten the baby’s cries as the room grew louder and more aggressive. One of the women leapt from her seat and swung her right fist at another, I stepped away to hush the baby all the more. 
Each and every time we met, the women within the cooperative were uncooperative.

As the weeks passed, attendance dwindled. The cooperative was never cohesive in the first place, then with the addition of witnessing fights, drop outs and with the uncertainty of our impact, how do you tell a group of impoverished sex workers that their way out of poverty and sex work, through a soap and lotion business will not be profitable for a long time?
Our impact was firstly hindered by a deluded expectation that the women would want to listen to us. We soon learnt, respect has to be earnt. One thing volunteers must be prepared for is how beneficiaries may react to them offering “help”. Help is not always how it is perceived. And help is not always what they want, rather “amafaranga”. As a volunteer you must be constantly learning, and constantly open to rejection and criticism. However, the cooperative’s inability to function needed a great deal of working on.
Secondly, “African Time” was detrimental, this being that everyone was always late, if they arrive at all. But we had to be patient for our fully HIV positive cooperative (as well as their children) were often under the weather. Weather itself was also our enemy. It was rainy season, and to the Rwandans, rain means you cannot possibly leave the house. Rain is lava. Therefore, the cooperative could not work effectively under these conditions, but we had to come to terms with the fact that they were our focus, and therefore, we had to work at their pace, even if that meant no progress could be made during the rain. 
However, doing so meant that production was slow, selling was near on impossible due to production and branding failures, therefore, no sales meant no profit. Frustrations were felt on both sides. But we had to be patient. We all had to, “umva” (listen). We were patient, we listened, with hours of translated meetings, we worked together to try to help the women take ownership of their cooperative.
Of course, this did not mean the end of our problems, more arose every day, such as issues of money, of incompetent NGO staff overriding our budget requests and ignoring the difficulties of the business and blaming the “mind-set” of the women, “choosing sex work” and “choosing not to wash themselves before meetings”. This perspective was also mirrored by one of our own volunteers who could not see past their profession and was afraid, disgusted and unwilling to cooperate with the women… I cannot fully express my disappointment in people, who you hope would all have good intentions, but discover that is not always the case.
Despite this, our solid team of three volunteers, inspired by the two most dedicated women, Alice and Louise, we made lotion, Vaseline, body milk, laundry and body soap. Together, we concocted new recipes as the women’s original trainer had taught them wasteful, expensive and poor quality recipes. 
The women stirred, sweated and lifted burning saucepans from the stove with their heatproof hands of steel. We began with our next challenge of branding, selling, cleanliness, best practice, stock management and selling. We pined for more time to ensure business stability and success. But knowing we were returning to the UK and having hoped our handover sufficient, we trusted the women to wake as the sun rises to walk to the local markets, to sell their product. So far, some has been sold, but we fear as our market research showed, that only time will tell, because the public is not always receptive to an unknown, unestablished, untrusted product, which does not bear the Rwandan stamp of approval, and is sold by sex workers…
Our various stages of experimenting with recipes 

I am apprehensive about the continued success but am pleased to see how far the women and the product came in such time. Cooperation and production in conjunction with the challenging gender based violence (GBV) monitoring made for a very difficult but entirely absorbing project. 
Within the GBV monitoring, we discussed and recorded the violent incidents that the women experienced each week, according to the GBV Index created; recording GBV in terms of types of physical, emotional, economic or verbal harm, from clients or people within the community, and so on. This was then recorded every week to track the most dangerous places and circumstances, for us to offer recommendations based upon research and networking.
The GBV monitoring required us to build a bond with the women despite essentially remaining superficially, at least, emotionally detached. During our network meetings with a local NGO called SFH (Sexual Family Health) and the hospital GBV centre Isange One Stop Centre, we discussed how the women can seek help, in terms of GBV and health (HIV, STDs and generally).
In reflection, I wish I could have been fluent in Kinyarwanda, to directly speak to the women, to understand and discuss problems, without the delay and miscommunication of translation. I believe this would have relieved some feelings of potential distrust and fears from the women at the beginning towards these strangers, claiming to be able to help. Mostly, I wish the women all the luck in the world, to successfully exit their profession which causes them great harm. I have insisted that our recommendations be put into place to ensure the continuation of their fully cooperative business. 

To Alice and Louise, lead the way for the cooperative, you can do this.


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