Each
weekday, my research assistant and me spend most of our time in someone’s hut,
conducting interviews. Huts are interspersed among other sheet metal, brick,
and cement houses, and are scattered all over Gulu (and northern Uganda). The
huts are round at the base with peaked roofs. The walls are built with packed
mud, while the roofs are constructed using fifty to sixty bamboo poles. The
bamboo is attached to the outside wall, it’s ends meeting and peaking in the
structure’s center (like a wide, shallow tipi). The bamboo scaffolding is then
covered with thick, dry grass thatch that extends about a foot and a half
beyond the mud walls. Inside, a mixture of mud and cow dung is routinely spread
across the floor, leaving speckles of grass and hints of sweet pastures. Lace
doily curtains hang from the doorways, obscuring the interior of the hut to the
outside, but allowing the breeze to drift in. Between the elevated roof and the
grass thatch exterior, the huts stay cool during dry season (a good twenty to
thirty degrees below temperatures outside), and provide much-needed refuge from
the heat. I sit on the floor resting against one of the twin-size beds, and my
research sits next to me on the bed. On the other side of the hut, sits a woman
who is a sex worker, who has agreed to participate in an interview.
One
part of this research is to understand why our – a woman who identifies as a
sex worker and myself – paths cross in this moment. How and why has this woman
come to participate in sex work? What has her experience in sex work been like?
Even
though I am nowhere near completing my interviews, some pathways to sex work
are starting to emerge. Most of the women who I have spoken to (this trip and
in 2012) are from northern Uganda and started in sex work for a number of reasons.
During the war, many families forced girls into or girls turned to sex work for
survival, following the loss of parents or other primary systems of support. Some
women started in sex work after giving birth when they were quite young. They had
no other way to support themselves, except to start doing sex work. Other women
entered sex work because they knew they could make more money in sex work than
in other jobs available to them in the area. For example, a woman working in a
hotel receives about two to three thousand UGS per day, which is about one
dollar per day. Depending on her family background (meaning whether or not she
has access to land) and her education level, if she does not have another
person contributing money to her household it is unlikely she would be able to
support herself on wages earned solely from working fulltime in a hotel, bar,
or office, especially if she has children.
In
addition to local women who participate in sex work in Gulu, there has been an
influx of Congolese sex workers in the area. The majority of Congolese sex
workers came to Gulu in one of two ways. Either they were living in refugee
camps and moved into the city to try to make a better life for themselves, or
they came to Gulu with their boyfriends, who were Ugandan soldiers posted in
eDRC. When the soldiers returned to Uganda with their Congolese girlfriends, they
deserted them. I noticed a similar pattern during the Sierra Leone civil war
when ECOWAS (Economic Community of West
African States) intervened. ECOWAS soldiers, mostly Nigerians, would have
affairs with Sierra Leonean women, take the women back to Nigeria, and desert
them. I am not sure, however, if these women ended up in sex work like Congolese
women in Gulu.
Aside
from sex work in Gulu, several women from northern Uganda I have spoken to, have
been told to go for “domestic” jobs in South Sudan, particularly in Juba. Upon
arriving in South Sudan, they end up working as sex workers, based in a hotel
attached to a bar (not quite a brothel). At first glance, it seems to be a
trafficking network, but most of the women said they were aware of the fact that
they would likely be doing sex work. They use the guise of “domestic” jobs to
hide their involvement in sex work from their families and friends back home.
Sex workers in South Sudan typically have managers. Their managers – Ugandan
women married to Sudanese men – manage their accommodations, supply them with
water, and in some cases offer them protection when they bring clients back to
the hotel (when needed). In Gulu, however, sex work remains largely unmediated,
meaning women do not have managers or pimps, and women solicit clients
themselves rather than a third party offering them to prospective buyers.
The one pathway that I am least familiar with, because it
is the most elusive, is an in-country network where girls are rotated between
different cities at regular intervals. I think some of the women I interviewed
during my trip in 2012 have made their way into this prostitution ring. I will
see them in a couple of weeks and find out.
…
For
a brief moment, during the interview, our paths cross. But when I leave the huts,
life is quite ordinary. The sun beats down on the red dirt. The air returns to
its hot, dry, and windy state. Chickens nestle in loose, shaded foliage, while goats
search for sparse greens. Children walk through the narrow passages between the
huts with yellow jerrycans balanced on their heads. Women hang wet laundry from
the lines, and stir large pots of posho and beans. People pass by on foot and
on motorcycles, oblivious to the lives and stories contained inside the dry
muds huts.
