By Irvine Syazyombo
After the death of her husband, life was hard for Doreen who had a son and a daughter living in the capital city of Holi Island, Shangu. She was just a marketer who sold vegetables at one of the markets in the city.
Her daughter, Anne was taken away by her sister in law, Gertrude, when the girl was nine so that her auntie could take her school.
But when she started living with her uncle and auntie, life became austere and quite different from what she had imagined.
Her auntie laterally turned her into a slave. She would toil doing all chores without going to school until she was fourteen when a cousin, Judy advised her to go and live with her within Shangu City.
Anne was surprised to discover that Judy, 21, had been living independently with three other young ladies in a two room shack in one of the ghettoes of Shangu.
Food was readily available for Anne though she was not sure what her cousin and her housemates were doing to make money.
However, it did not take long before the other prostitutes started complaining that they were fed up with feeding a ‘fellow woman’ who was old enough to make her own money.
Anne was not comfortable at her young age of fourteen to be called a woman capable of making money. She wondered how she would make money.
“I started making money for myself at thirteen,” Judy revealed to Anne.
“How?” Anne wondered.
Judy revealed that they were sex workers before the women tipped Anne how to hook men and make money.
“But there are diseases.HIV…”
“What are you saying Anne?” Judy asked. “It is either you risk contracting HIV and make money or die of starvation. We rent his house you live in through sex.”
From that time on Anne became a sex worker at the tender age of fourteen in steady of her to be in school.
She would wear skimpy shorts, skirts and revealing blouses and stand at various road sides before unscrupulous men pulled in to driver to various hotels and lodges.
Five years later Anne went back to live with her mother in the same city of Shangu where she continued the lifestyle of a prostitute through which she supported the two children she had got through the indulgency.
However, one day an elderly man picked her up and drove to a lodge where he spent most of the night with her in bed.
But when she asked for payment, the man argued that he found no reason to pay her for the service because she had equally enjoyed sex with him.
Because she had desperate financial obligations at home, she uncontrollably insisted that she be given the money which prompted the elderly man to batter and drop her for dead ten kilometers outside the city in the bush.
In the morning a well wisher picked her up and drove her to the Shangu Teaching Hospital where she underwent treatment for her swollen face and painful sides.
After her treatment she stopped the dangerous vice and joined a women’s support organization that sponsored her until she became a nurse.
To this day she is a very good role model to women who are still trapped in the vice of recklessly sleeping with evil men of various characters.
She advises them to quit risking their lives and look for women’s organizations which can help them lead normal lives.
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