Today we started by visiting a village which World Vision had only had a presence in for one and a half years. We were told that already incredible things had happened, a self help group, a youth club and a kids club had already been created in this short period of time. I was honored when they asked me to open the kids center by cutting the ribbon, and we were all then presented with ‘mala’ a necklace of orange flowers and a red and yellow bracelet as well as given a red bindi on our foreheads, it was so amazing to see the help that World Vision had given these children and above all the sense of hope for the future that they were being given through their basic education at the kids club. As I cut the ribbon all the children rushed in with excitement to see their new center, it was wonderful to see them so happy. After the opening of the school we did some colouring with the children with colouring sets that we had brought with us from the UK. We were able to talk to some of the locals by trying to improvise in several languages. I thought it was nice that despite the barriers in communication we were sill able to have fun blowing bubbles, bouncing balls and colouring in. We also went to visit the self help group run by about eight women who traveled to Jaipur every month to sell rice and lentils in order to get money as an alternative to working as commercial sex workers. It was so great to see how much they had progressed in such little time and once again the potential that World Vision had allowed them to realize. These women had great hope for the future.
Before we left the village all the children presented me with the colouring and pictures that they had been doing earlier with me, it was really nice that they wanted me to have the pictures that they had drawn.
We left this village and went to a village which we were warned would be one of the worst we would see on our trip with the highest number of sex workers, the most ignorance about contraception, and the most reluctance to give up the trade in favor of another less well paid job. This village, to put it extremely bluntly was effectively a red light district. This made me quite apprehensive about what I would see as I thought what I had seen already in the previous villages was bad enough. When we arrived in this village we were able to see straight away how different it was to the other ones we have seen, there were girls dressed in western more revealing clothing, wearing full make up.
We were able to meet and talk to some of these girls, who were extremely open about exactly what they did and why they did it. Two of the girls who were sisters aged twenty and 18, had traveled from 160 km away from their family to work within the village because they felt ashamed of undertaking sex work in front of their family where they had grown up. They also knew that they would be able to get more work and earn more money doing that work in this particular village, because their clients were not only the truckers but also local men. When we were talking to the girls, there was a constant presence of a hugely fat woman who clearly acted in a ‘pimp’ role, taking charge of the prices paid for the girls by their clients and bartering. Allen also made us aware of the growing tendency within that village for parents to traffic their children to Mumbai as young as at the age of twelve, so they could work as dancers in clubs and partake in commercial sex work. Here, they could charge up to ten times as much as in their villages.
After lunch we went to a third village, where we could immediately feel a tense mood. We learned that there had been a fight there the previous night in which the police had been called. After we were assured that we were still welcome and able to film, we went into the village to meet some of the people and to try and interview a young commercial sex worker. It was here that I met Rakhee, a 19 year old sex worker. As soon as I saw her, it was clear how deeply her work in the sex trade had affected her, her manipulation of not only us as visitors but others within the community was blatant, her flippant temper and mood swings quite disturbing, and her need to to be center of attention at all times was clear and tragic. It was extremely hard for me to spend time with someone who was so negatively affected by what she had been exposed to at such a young age. She was the same age as me. I could not even begin to put myself in her shoes and imagine what she had been experiencing since the age of twelve at the hands of her clients. It was clear to me that her childhood had been stolen from her and maimed the person she would have been if she was not born into a life of commercial sex work.
I made friends with her, communicating with actions – and we got on well. Then we went away from everyone else in order to undertake the interview. I asked her questions which were then translated to her in order for her to answer. She told us her story, about the death of her mother, her lack of choice in profession, and her inability to get any another job apart from commercial sex work. When I asked her what job she would want to do in an ideal world, she replied that she would do anything else apart from sex work if only given the opportunity. It was heartbreaking when she talked about her clients, how they treated her, and how on some days she would only have one client while on other days she would have to have up to ten.
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