HIV and AIDS: The Global Inter-Connection

ONE MORE RISK IN A VERY RISKY WORLD

Ana Vasconcelos
Interviewed by Edison Maciel

Whenever a worker loses his job, his children head for the streets. The worker's child has a better chance of bringing home what the family needs to survive. A man begging is not of very much use. A child begging can always bring in some money. So the economic factor is the most important one when sending children to the streets.

In 1987 I helped found the Task Force on Children and, in 1988, SOS Children, the first group concerned with providing legal assistance to children in the city. I am an attorney and I have also completed postgraduate work in urban and rural development. I was practicing law when my cousin Jarbas Vasconcelos was elected prefect of the city of Recife. Because he was someone whom I admired a great deal, I accepted when he asked me to assume responsibility for policy relating to the welfare of street children.

I began as vice president of the Special Legion of Recife, a non-governmental agency, and was also responsible for advising the prefect on labour issues and social affairs. I was trying to coordinate the activities of the prefecture and the Special Legion of Recife, in order to get people to take an integrated approach to the question of street children, rather than formulate policy in isolation.

In 1987, we began distributing condoms to children, irrespective of their age, provided that they asked for them. We realized from the feedback we got from other institutions that 1987 marked the beginning of major discrimination against commercial sex workers and street girls. People began to be more disgusted and repulsed by the girls.

Culturally a woman in the streets is a commercial sex worker. Even if a girl is not a commercial sex worker, because she is living in the streets she is regarded as a symbol of the ugliness of the sex trade industry and sin. Above and beyond this, the girls came to represent the danger of HIV.

From 1986 to 1987 I had been trying to ensure that street girls received the same attention as the boys. I had thirty-five specialists working with me, thirty-three women and two men. These women had problems working with the girls because, as they told me, "Girls are elusive, they slip through your fingers. It is as if they do not want anything, as if they actually like both sex work and the streets."

I knew this was not true. Beginning in June of 1988, I went out into the streets in earnest. I would work in the office until early afternoon and then go out to meet the girls. As a result, I began to understand the problems that the women specialists were experiencing while working with the girls. If you try to work with children only in terms of employment and political organization, you will get nowhere because these children are never going to earn more than a pittance. People who have a very political view fail to ask, "Who is this child?" "What is she feeling and thinking?" "What does she want?" "What makes her tick?"

When people who are concerned approach the girls, they find that they have other, more specific problems that they want to discuss. Sexuality, what it means to be a girl and to be out in the street; what it is to experience pregnancy, an abortion, menstruation.

Girls want to discuss sexual violence. A girl will say, "I did not die, but I was raped. I paid with my body, with my very life." Girls want to talk about how boys boss them in the streets and beat them up. These girls are completely hemmed in, and they want to talk about these issues.

Boys get into many more confrontations with the police. In certain respects the boys take from society, whereas girls get into commercial sex work and their work is one of the supports of our society. In fact, sex work helps to keep many families together because men have a double standard: a wife at home and a sex worker in the streets. In truth, girls do not upset the system. They play an important role, which is to satisfy men. They do not challenge the system while the boys disrupt and steal, although some girls get into stealing as well.

Girls follow a pattern which we are studying. When a girl leaves home, she tries to succeed as a peddler. But she has to compete with the male-dominated labour market. A girl will dress up like a boy to wash cars. When the boys discover that she is a girl, they send her packing because the street turf is all divided up. As in real life and in society at large, the girls have no place that is theirs. Girls have no place in the labour market of the streets. So the girls fall in with a gang. They fight to be able to go on peddling; some succeed but others will find out that they cannot. Everything ends in sex work or else the girl ends up dead. She does not have any choice in the matter because violence is the way of the streets. She will be raped constantly. The only escape is to sell her body in order to obtain a little peace. Sometimes sex work is a form of self-defence. As the girls say, "We are going to sell what they want to take by force or by charm."

As a rule, all the girls say, "I have to help my mother." And in fact they do help. So when a girl takes to the streets, even when her mother has thrown her out, she has one concern: "I want to help my mother." I think that every girl who has a family has this desire to help out her family. They even say, "You feel bad about eating when you know your mother is not eating." This concern is always present.

The other girls help their families too, but it is more of a sometime thing, because they do not go home every day. If they earn more money, they bring some home. Almost all of them have some contact with their families, even if it is only once a year at Christmas. All of them have memories of their families, although some have no family because of death or because they do not know their families.

When I talked with girls in the streets to see how we could carry out our work in mutual respect, they would say that I should get the hell out of there, because they knew that I was the vice president of an institution. They would ask me, "Don't you know that this is the way to hell here?"

This made quite an impression on me. For the girls, the very culture of the streets was the road to hell. Then I saw that some Protestant religious groups were telling them, "Everybody here is going to hell, because the only thing here is crazy people, thieves, and drug addicts." So there was a need for a special place where people could create a way to heaven.

That was the origin of the idea of a house, a temporary shelter, where people could talk, bathe, eat and work out strategies for reaching heaven. This heaven was beautiful because it was very much a voyage of self-discovery, the idea of being oneself, discussing one's problems, getting to know oneself. That was the heaven that people were thinking of, which I was thinking of, for the girls. The heaven of truth.

On 15 May, 1989, we succeeded, with the help of some friends, in opening the Temporary Shelter. Today we have two shelters and various houses where on average we assist one hundred girls a day. The others we see on the run, so to speak; they pass by, pick up a condom, get some information, and go to one of our doctors. When they find out that they have contracted HIV there is great despair. That is when they seek us out. They arrive crying that they have AIDS; they are in despair that they are going to die.

We are a small group, only twenty-five technical specialists, but we provide the lead. Half of our concerns are with bare survival. So we realize that our project is one that cannot reach very many people. Our staff has their work cut out for them every day. We have just completed a two-month street campaign in which we distributed 16,000 condoms.

In this environment which is totally conducive to the transmission of viruses, the incidence of sexually transmitted infections is incredible. Girls with whom we come into contact are brought to the hospitals. Doctors cannot believe what they are seeing. Ten-year-old girls have diseases that, in the past, only thirty-year-olds would have.

There are even moments when I think I have HIV. Because I live with this very insane thing, I do not know whether or not I am contracting it too. Our workers take care of girls who come in to us bleeding, who have been raped, or who have been stabbed. Sometimes we have gloves, sometimes we do not. Sometimes I have the feeling that we are all infected. I think we need a greater sense of solidarity with respect to HIV and AIDS in this country.

Approximately 10 per cent of our girls are infected with HIV, but this is a rough estimate. We have already lost two girls, with whom we used to work every day, to AIDS. I am very apprehensive about such a projection because there are times when you think that this disease is going to affect everybody. You know that a particular boy does not have any of the symptoms yet, but he has tested positive. That boy is having sex with who knows how many people. So when is this going to show up?

We supply condoms to the girls, and they are very keen on getting them. On a single night we took 1,000 condoms to distribute in the streets and our supply was exhausted because they are expensive to buy. Some customers already carry condoms, middle-class people or foreigners. Some girls are even refusing customers. They will only go out with them if a condom is used. So customers are beginning to realize that they lose nothing by using a condom.

It is a challenge to the machismo of those customers who react negatively: "Do you think I am sick? Do you think you are better than me? How can you, a prostitute, think that you are better than me?" But the girls say, "It's not because I am better than you, but because I can have a disease, too, and might infect you."

Our people have put a great deal of effort into helping with these dialogues. Some girls play the role of customers and others play the girls. This role playing has yielded positive results. We have three theater groups, each one is made up of seven girls, and they perform in the streets and even in the brothels. They put on a play entitled "It's AIDS," saying that A is for amor (love), I for informaçao (information), D for dignidade (dignity), and S for saude (health).

The play is about a woman and her daughters who are suddenly left without any means of support. In desperation she opens a brothel and begins to make money, but she does not pay any attention to HIV. Ultimately only the mother and two of her daughters survive; one of them gets out of commercial sex work and finds a job. The other one decides to stay but not to turn tricks. She then organizes the women.

In the end the mother understands that if the brothel is to continue, if she is to continue to make money, the brothel must be clean and well-organized, and the question of HIV and AIDS must be discussed.

People are spreading the word. I have no doubt that this is thanks to the energy which we find among the girls, a very powerful energy. These girls are very strong. They know that they are going to die before they reach the age of twenty-five, and yet they continue to live, to live life. I think that, yes, these are miracles that have been performed. We have another group of girls whom we call health protection outreach workers. Each year we train about thirty of them. During their training they pass on information to other girls. This is work that requires patience, methodical work in which we have to rely on one another. I believe we have changed behaviours and we have made a substantial contribution.

This city and the rest of the country are a joke. I open the morning newspaper and I read that the State is unable to spend any more money on HIV; it says that there is no money in the budget to care for people with HIV. Even the funds to pay the staff have run out.

Moreover, condoms are not being distributed in this city. Often the condoms are held up in the health department because there are certain prescribed procedures for distributing them. In my opinion, there should be a condom dispenser on every street corner of this city. They say that the population is becoming depraved. So be it. But think of the difference between distributing condoms and treating the population. Isn't it much cheaper to distribute condoms?

I believe that there is no money because it is earmarked for other purposes. There is much more concern today with industrialization than with saving people who are dying. I do not dispute that we have to become a country that is able to compete, but I also believe that we must rescue this population. What is happening is that 10 per cent are going forward and 90 per cent are dying along the way.

Society has approached commercial sex workers and homosexuals as if they pose a threat to society. Obviously the prejudices are very strong. And people are very afraid, including health and social workers. People's fear of intimacy has increased.

As a general rule, the government's campaigns are designed to frighten people. "Watch out, AIDS is going to get you." "AIDS kills." When a campaign is so heavy-handed and does not suggest any alternatives, at a certain point people do not pay attention any more. How will a girl living in the slums without enough money to survive understand "AIDS is going to get you. Be careful!"? She will say, "So, what am I supposed to do?" Is she supposed to become sexually inactive? She is not going to do that because the only thing left for the poor is sex. No one can take sexual pleasure away. It would kill any of us, but much more so those who have no other outlets, those who cannot indulge in fantasy by going to a shopping mall to buy nice clothes.

In the final analysis, HIV is just one more risk in a very risky world. As they say, "AIDS has no name in Brazilian! So I am going to worry about a disease that has a Brazilian name" like venereal disease, hunger, and malnutrition. What we need is not campaigns which say that AIDS is going to get you, but others that say, "We have ways to help you to avoid getting sick."

What are we going to do with the people, exterminate them? Is HIV not a form of extermination? We also need a population that is much more aware. People sometimes say that there is no government that is good. I have been thinking lately that what we need is people who are demanding. How can we get the people to demand more? I believe that the president or other government officials, will create new policies if the people are organized. Our people have lost their bearings. Why is this? Because 70 per cent are hungry.

At forty-six years of age, I am very tired because I have been working in the streets for six years without rest. There are moments when I say, "My God, I think I'm going to kick the bucket this year."

I am travelling a great deal. I will be going to Maceio and Fortaleza soon. I am also involved with the women's movement, and I see that feminist groups are beginning to be concerned about the girls. This is a good thing. These people want to hear about the experience of others, and want to set up a programme similar to ours. There are no other programmes specifically targeted to girls.

We get some government funding but we need help that is more sustained. It is not just the shelter that needs more systematic help. All the groups need it. How can we work if funding is not provided on a planned basis?

So we survive, in these enormous vacuums, with outside funding. We get money from Germany, from the Netherlands, and a little from the United States. Our very heartfelt thanks go to all the people at international agencies. If you could only mention all their names: Terre des Hommes, Caritas, Bread for the World, Miserium, and others. Many of them are Catholic agencies that give us money, respect us, and do not put any pressure on us. I find it quite nice to work with them. There are also Dutch agencies such as Norbe, Kinder, and the Altiplano Alternative; an American agency called the Catholic Children's Foundation, and also the private organizations such as Humankind, and Childhope in England. Occasionally we receive a small grant from UNICEF.

I would like to thank the staff for all their support because these people exist only to help others. We are stronger for their efforts. I want to set up hundreds of shelters in this country and abroad. A shelter, as the name implies, is a place where you can seek information, support, and get the strength you need to go on living life, to be respected, to rest, to think. I only want people to raise children in harmony with the environment, in harmony with nature, to educate them, and to save them from extermination at the hands of HIV.

Ana Vasconcelos has been working to promote the welfare of, and to minimize the spread of HIV among, the children and adolescents who work and live in the streets and brothels of Recife, Brazil. Up to 30,000 children go daily to Recife's streets, seeking money to help their families survive. About 4,000 of these youngsters, says Vasconcelos, exist entirely within a street culture. To reach the female children and adolescents, Vasconcelos has created a network of educational, medical and shelter services, anchored by Casa de Passagem (Passage House) located downtown in the heart of Recife.

Biographical Note

Edison Maciel is a Brazilian journalist and photographer who travels extensively throughout South America covering the region for the Danish newspaper Information.