Bailed out of prostitution, Nansubuga returns favour

There are stories one would never, not even in their wildest nightmare, wish on themselves or anyone.
Imagine one misogynistic man, probably 20 years your daughter’s senior, having sex with her all in exchange for peanuts.

These men buy sex from these young girls and think they are in a mutually benefitting affair.

This is the story of real-life girls forced into the age-old trade, and their struggle to move on.

Nansubuga's life story

Mariam Nansubuga, 30, was forced into prostitution as a child, turning to drugs and getting addicted to them, in order to stomach the torture of having sex with at least four men each night.

Nansubuga was orphaned at the age of six, after her father died in 1989. Her mother had died two months after Nansubuga was born. A surviving stepmother was one hell of a ruthless being. She even denied her a chance to see a blackboard beyond kindergarten’s top class.

When the stepmother’s insults intensified, Nansubuga ran away from home in Luweero in 1990, at age seven.

“I moved to Wobulenzi and slept on a veranda the first night before I set out in the morning to look for petty jobs that I could do to raise some money,” Nansubuga says.

Luckily, one woman gave her a job as a housemaid for six months before referring her to her sister in Gayaza. She received no pay for her efforts and this prompted her to leave just after six months of her transfer.

She then stayed with her childhood friend in Komamboga but had to pay rent. This was in 1992 when she was just nine. Unknown to Nansubuga, this friend was a sex worker who later introduced the nine-year-old to sex trade.

Launching into the unknown

One night with the moon high, Nansubuga joined her friend to sell their bodies. The thought of having intercourse at that tender age made Nansubuga squeamishly uncomfortable. But she had to do it; letting men old enough to be her grandfathers use her for sexual gratification.

While every girl remembers the day she lost her virginity for quite different reasons, Nansubuga remembers how much she sold hers.

“On my very first night, I earned Shs 3,000 but the experience was horrible. I bled, felt pain and did not enjoy it. How couldn’t this ‘defiler’ see that I was a child?”

Nansubuga tells me with agitation in her voice that one could cut through with a knife. Her immaturity and naivety seemed not to move her ‘professional’ friend who bought her painkillers to ease the pain.

Still she had to work in order to raise Shs 30,000 for their Shs 60,000 room. On her second day, she received three clients. 

Slowly, her fear was abated. Soon, men seemed to prefer her – the pre-puberty child – to the ‘old brooms’ which did not go down well with them because she started to make more money than them.

Together with her roommate, they moved to different places including Kalerwe, Kampala Casino, Ange Noir until they finally shifted to Bwaise’s notorious Kimombasa in 1995.
Within a month, she was making Shs 12,000 a night.

“I upgraded my skills and worked even harder because I saw it as the only alternative for income, although I did not enjoy even one session,” the mother of seven says.

“Once, a man took me to a lodge and paid me Shs 20,000. He used me for six straight hours. It clocked 5:30am and he still had energy for another one hour till 6:30am,” she says.

“When it was time to go, he escorted me to get a boda boda back home and the unthinkable happened. He grabbed me by the neck and told me to return his Shs 20,000 and also give him what I had already made. I walked home that morning, crying and in despair.”

“Another paid me Shs 10,000 for a short [engagement] and took me to his home. When I reached home, there were about four other men and they all used me in turn from 9pm to 1am. I was 11 years old then. Despite my screaming, no one intervened.”

Experimenting with drugs and alcohol

In order to withstand the cold and assaults, Nansubuga was introduced to a cocktail of drugs such as marijuana, mairungi and jet fuel.

“During day time, we would be drunk and this was meant to charge us for the night so that we could withstand all sorts of men, especially those who did not want to wear condoms,” Nansubuga said.

She surrounded herself with smokers, bandits and drunkards. Soon, she got herself a boyfriend, a former client.

Her boyfriend was no lover but a vicious pimp who left her pregnant at 13 years old. Her pregnancy was another nightmare plagued with frequent illness, vomiting and weight loss.

Then the worst part came during labour at Mulago hospital, a process that lasted five days, worrying doctors and nurses. It was later discovered that her system was clogged with drugs, which disrupted the delivery process.

“I spent three months on oxygen and it took me almost a full year to walk upright again. In fact, this birth affected me because I still limp a little,” she laments.

And to think she was only arriving at the door of adolescence, the age when most girls are only discovering their bodies and hormones. Yet here she was, a thoroughly sexually-experienced mother.

“After birth, my child was taken to the special care unit because I was still very weak.”

For six months, she remained bed-ridden and did not take to the streets until after a year.

Yet two years later, in 1998, Nansubuga was to become pregnant again. This time, she did not know the child’s father. And so it was with her third pregnancy in 1999. Bad luck struck that year too. Her friend and roommate passed away.

Lease of life

After recovering from that death, she worked herself hoarse, this time sleeping with about eight men each night to fend for her children. She always had a desire to abandon the trade but saw no way out.

Then in 2007, Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU), an NGO promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights services, identified her and many others through its scouts.

The organization was holding a one-week entrepreneurship training for ‘moonlight stars’ at Tick hotel in Kawempe.

“I initially had refused their offer because I knew it would be a waste of time. But the scouts persisted and said they would pay us and give us start-up capital for businesses,” Nansubuga says, adding that about 20 of at least 60 prostitutes turned up.

It was worthwhile. The entrepreneurship training aside, they also received counselling and volunteering skills she uses to-date. She was given Shs 100,000 as start-up capital for her new job of vending clothes and selling cassava. On average, these bring her Shs 250,000 a month.

She is also one of 90 peer educators at the RHU Moonlight Star Clinic in Bwaise where I found her counselling a youth on family planning. The clinic’s in-charge, Mariam Mugambi, told me Nansubuga is now a great resource in the clinic.

“She labours to do cross counselling and advising those still in the trade to join her because of the dangers accruing, such as unwanted pregnancies and STIs,” Mugambi said.

In her long-term plans, Nansubuga hopes to build a house. In 2008, she met and is staying with the father of her four youngest children. But the journey to quit sex work has not been a smooth one.

“I still get phone calls from some men asking to sleep with them, but I have resisted the urge and I am concentrating on my businesses.”

Her friend, Edith Nakiganda, 26, is now making a living out of baking cakes. She was trained and given start-up capital of Shs 200,000 by RHU after bailing her out of sex trade in 2007.

Each of these women admits it is only when they left that they realised that prostitution is the worst slime in the cesspool of life. But when, like Nansubuga, prostitution is what life handed you in place of a doll as a young girl, you probably don’t know any better.

Thanks to RHU, the former sex workers have a real shot at normalcy; if they can put their lost childhoods behind them permanently, that is.

ninsiima@observer.ug

Sex education could have made all the difference

Suzan Adong massages the black rusty arm of her chair, leans back and chats away during the morning with her friends at the Reproductive Health Unit (RHU), a health-cum-training centre in Apac district.

Three minutes later, she’s back to business, making a pillow case on her sewing machine. Five minutes later, a nurse shouts out, disturbing her concentration.

“Adong, come and get the medicines to give to your baby,” she says in Langi, the local language spoken by the region’s inhabitants.

This instruction, its plain message aside, serves to remind her that she is no longer the ordinary school-going child she once was. The thought that she’s now a teenage mom trying to continue her education at an alternative school reoccupies her mind. Adong enrolled for a six months course in Tailoring and Design in August this year, having dropped out of school two years earlier because of getting pregnant. Apart from Tailoring, the centre also offers reproductive health and literacy skills and gives counseling, mostly to the youth.

Adong at the RHU clinic which has incorporated a tailoring school for teenage-mother school dropouts.

Outside Adong’s study room, happy little faces of children running around the school premises rush past us. Such moments make her realize what an appalling mistake she made engaging in sex at the age of 16.

Life changed for the now 19 year old, who once harbored the ambitions of becoming a nurse, when she exchanged her body for promised school fees money.

“While I was in Primary seven at Arocha primary school, I was occasionally sent back home for uncompleted payments of school fees. However, there was this man who promised to pay Shs 15,000 for me each term if I slept with him. I gave in,” the smooth skinned, milky eyed lass says, catching her breath as if her heart was about to spring out of her chest. 

This man and Adoch were just village friends but on the day he proposed to pay her school fees, he held her hand and they headed to his home. And as they say, the rest is history.

The banner of myths was still flying high in her young mind. Her colleagues always joked that girls cannot get pregnant the first time they have sex or that they couldn’t get pregnant if they had a bath immediately afterwards.

Oblivious of what her parents’ reaction would be, she kept the ‘promise’ and events of the evening a secret.

Two months later, she felt that something was going on inside her. She had skipped her monthly periods and was starting to feel sick. Gradually, the five kilometre journey to school from Baradong village became a cumbersome task.

Later, her mother’s suspicion of her first born child being pregnant was confirmed after Adoch felt weak and sick, and upon checking her, the doctor declared that she was pregnant.

“I was chased from home and I went to stay with my aunt and my lover disappeared on learning that I was pregnant. I stopped going to school and I can’t stop thinking of what I would have become if I had struggled on without giving in to this lie!” she coyly says, staring at the dusty cement floor.

Adoch’s advice now is for schools and parents to teach the children the dangers of early sexual activity which she didn’t know much about then.

COST ON EDUCATION

The 2012 State of Uganda Population report reveals that parenthood is a leading cause of school dropout among teenage girls. It notes that 30 per cent of teenage girls cite pregnancy or parenthood as a reason for dropping out of high school.

Moreover, less than one per cent of young teen mothers (those who have a baby before 18) attain a university degree by 30 and this trend negatively impacts on their children’s education.

“Children of teen mothers are more likely to drop out of high school than those of mothers who give birth at a later age. In fact, only about two-thirds of children born to teen mothers earn elementary education compared to 80 per cent of children of later child bearers,” reads the report.

A teenage mother in Apac district admires her baby.

RATIONALE FOR SEX EDUCATION

Lack of sex education in schools has been identified as a major contributory factor to the high rate of teenage pregnancy. Joyce Ampumuza, the project officer at DSW (Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung), a German NGO, says many young people are getting misleading information from their peers because parents consider discussion about sex a taboo.

A 2008 research by the Guttmacher Institute on youths aged 12 to 14 years in Uganda shows that only 33.8 per cent of females and 22 per cent of males have received sexuality education in schools. Guttmacher is an American organisation that seeks to advance sexual and reproductive health through research, policy analysis and public education. Currently, the ministry of Education messages to pupils and students is largely focusing on abstinence.

Ampumuza says life skills such as communications and coping skills and sexual reproductive health rights need to be incorporated in schools to help reduce the children’s ignorance. This includes teaching children about the emotional aspects of sexual relationships, sexually transmitted infections, HIV/Aids and the consequences of becoming sexually active.

She adds that this should be done to dispel myths like those Adong had.

Her views are supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) country representative, Esperance Fundira who believes that information empowers young people with informative decision making choices.  

“When girls are educated and healthy, they are more likely to marry later, delay childbearing and gain productive or employable skills. We must therefore enforce existing laws and policies to ensure that no girl below 18 is allowed to get married,” Fundira argues.

One success story is that of Atar primary school in Apac that has a project dubbed ‘family initiative’ where teachers and parents organize monthly counseling sessions for the pupils.

Francis Lagmuht, a teacher at the school, says the initiative has registered success this year as no dropouts due to early pregnancy have been recorded compared to four cases last year. 

Girls clad in T-shirts with messages that are aimed at encouraging them to keep in school.

Elsewhere, the Netherlands, where sex education begins at preschool and is integrated into all levels and subjects of schooling, boasts of having one of the lowest teen birth rates in the world at 5.3 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 (2011 UNAIDS report).

DOUBLE MINISTRY EFFORT

The ministry of Health has partnered with the ministry of Education to draft a policy on school health with a special focus on re-enrolling adolescent ‘mother’ dropouts back into school.

 “We intend to work with the Education Ministry to ensure that we identify girls who have dropped out of school because of early pregnancy to re-enrol so that they are empowered with knowledge and life skills,” the acting head for Reproductive Health Services, in the ministry of Health, Dr Collins Tusingwiire says.

In the ongoing efforts between the two ministries, the state minister for Primary Health Care, Sarah Opendi, says there is a review of the lower school curriculum to incorporate adolescent-friendly health information in schools.

There is also support of parent peer programmes for adolescent and reproductive health and training of peer educators to provide this information in schools.