Sex workers in Nimba County have been having series of called meetings voicing out their displeasure and frustration over the continual arriver of their colleagues from Monrovia and other parts of the country overtaken their operation (Prostitution).
A prostitute or sex worker is someone who gets paid to have sex, this word usually refers to a woman, but there are male prostitutes as well; there are many slang words, such as hooker and whore, that mean the same thing.
According to OK FM Correspondent in the county, these sex workers are angry with their colleagues from other parts of the country who they described as intruders, noting that they have resolved to stage a serious protest in the county, if nothing is done to resolve such act on the part of those who usually arrive in the commercial cities of Ganta and Sanniquille to disturb their regular operations.
In 2017, an online http://www.africametro.com/ where some sex workers explained their experience in the sector, quoting one Angel Hawkins has spent 11 years working as a sex worker in one of Liberia’s slum communities noted for harboring teenage prostitutes, drug users and thieves, and armed robbers.
She’s a mother of four, all by different fathers. Sex for money became her best option as a means of survival when she dropped out of school, she explained.
FrontPageAfrica visited Angel at her zinc shack residence located in a ghetto near Paynesville City, outside Monrovia.
“I had really bad health issues and although I wanted to finish my high school, I knew I couldn’t,” she revealed.
“So I decided to return to Paynesville, where I find peace. I thought it would be easier to find somewhere to stay and get a peace of mind than it was with my step mother in Sinkor.”
Angel explained that when she left her step-mother’s house, she struggled to find a living place of her own.
“One night, I was thrown out of my friend’s place because I was not helping to pay the rent.”
“So I just went to Red-Light where I bumped into one drug dealer.”
According to her, meeting the dealer who she refused to name was a life-changing moment for her.
“He asked if I wanted to buy any drug. I said no.”
But Angel was no stranger to drugs. She told FrontPageAfrica that it was drugs that got her into the streets.
However, according to her, the dealer took advantage of her destituteness and made her an offer.
He said: “I can help you make some money. Let’s go round the ghetto and offer a deal: you give them blowjob, and I sell them some coke.”
This was a deal she agreed to after she was intoxicated by him, she said.
She said it was in that ghetto another man offered her somewhere to sleep – a place that did not belong to him, rather his friend.
This, according to her, was how she landed in the midst of prostitutes. The place was an area where men often went to find prostitutes.
“I didn’t even really care by then,” Angel said.
“I saw one client that night and had LD$350.00. Fortunately, he was super-easy; he just wanted to look at me and touch me a little bit.
He was really friendly and seemed a bit embarrassed about being there,” she said.
According to her, at the onset, she wasn’t preferred by many clients, as she still hadn’t bought herself a ‘sexy outfit’, underwear and high heels like the other girls.
Angel explained that most of my clients are between the ages of 25 and 55, many of them were drug users.
She shared with FrontPageAfrica her ordeal with one drug dealer, who according to her had taken in cocaine.
“There was one guy who’d take more than 5 grams of cocaine within an hour.”
“One day he asked if I wanted some so I took some; then he was putting his hands in my vagina and I was taking in more of the cocaine.”
“In that time, my heart started beating fast and I was really sweating. I tried to leave, but he locked the door.
“When the owner of the place came to tell us our hour was up, he just opened the door and paid for another hour. We did a lot of nasty things.”
Angel now manages of three female ghettoes in Red-Light, Paynesville in an area called Poultry.
Poultry, according to her was a fishery and cold storage site, but was looted by rebels prior to the civil war.
Gift Worwo, another sex worker in the ghetto could not tell FrontPageAfrica her age, but from observations, she’s the youngest among 15 sex workers in Poultry.
She lives in a bloc named Deadly Women-4.
Gift has tattoos around her legs and has pierced her navel, the top of her eye and wore a colorful braided hair.
She could not spell her name during the interview. When asked for the correct spelling of her name, she screamed, “I can’t spell it. You want story so spell it.”
Gift used to live with her aunty, but she got introduced to drugs during a friend’s party and has since been after it – a reason for which she is in the ghetto.
Gift is in her mid-teens. She said she sleeps with at least seven men a night and earns about LD$700 -LD$1,050 .00
“Sometime I sleep with seven men a night. If the night is good, I get more than a thousand Liberian dollars but if it’s bad it is around seven hundred.”
Gift is an elementary school dropout. She said she wants to do trade to support herself, but acknowledged that she would need some counseling to help her leave the ghetto.
“Sometimes I want to leave the street, but I don’t know where I will go. For now, I want do sewing, but I need people to talk to me like female who will inspire me,” she told FrontPageAfrica.
FrontPageAfrica also met Dorcas Davies, 23. She has been living in the ghetto since she was 10, she said.
“I have a daughter but I don’t count her as my child because I don’t even know who her father is, because I don’t have one man; so now she’s around anybody can take her,” Dorcas said.
“Her name is Survivor. Let me tell you, I enjoy sex for money and I take it LD$100.00 a night. Some nights I take 9, 10 or 12 men a night but I haven’t reached 20 men because as soon I reach 12, my thing can get sour, but what to do, life has to go on.”
According to her, that she was exposed to the ghetto through her friend who died from presumably from HIV.
Mary Kollie is another young sex worker in Poultry ghetto. Without hesitation, she told FrontPageAfrica, “I can only come here to smoke and see my boyfriend. He owns the male ghetto, but I don’t go out to f**k. We manage this place, we always send out girls to f***k.”
For Lovetee Kamara, she explained – “This place is our living area. I’ve been her for nine years and I’m satisfied with this place.”
“I’m selling drugs and I regularly have sex for my living. I have two children they live in Bernard Farm with my mom; so I go out and have sex and later carry the money and items for their support.”
Patience Zoegar – an elderly woman in Poultry ghetto – is the chairlady of girls in the area. She runs a motel in the area and admitted using some of the girls as sex slaves.
She explained of how her girls often use ‘bubble’ to make their clients sleep which gives them perfect opportunity to rob their clients of their valuables and run away.
‘Bubbles’, according to her, is a tiny tablet that they mostly use to trick men and seduced them to discharge faster and fall deep asleep.
Credit: FPA
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