I have been asked this question a lot since I have returned
from my month in Kolkata. How was
the food? How were the
people? What did I do? What did the Lord do?
If these are some of your questions as you have followed me
in my journey, I hope that these next couple of posts will answer some of your
questions.
I was working in Sonagachi, Kolkata’s infamous sex
district. Our contact came out to
meet us at the facility we were living in the day that we arrived, and he told
us about what we were walking into.
Sonagachi is one square kilometer, and in it, there are
10,000 prostitutes. They service
20,000 men per night. In the city
of Kolkata, 200,000 people live per square kilometer. There are just stacks and stacks of people living in tiny
spaces. They sleep in shifts and
often have a platform built to divide the room in half horizontally so that
half sleep on the top and half on the bottom. Marital intimacy is for the most part impractical, which
helps to explain the large numbers of men who visit Sonagachi each night.
The average age that a girl is brought into the brothels is
11 years old, though some are much younger. These young girls are generally sold by their parents or
kidnapped from the villages or from neighboring countries such as Nepal. They are locked in their little cell
for years. Literally. They are often drugged in the
beginning, and they are raped non-stop for weeks in order to break them and
destroy their spirit. Often, awful
procedures are done to them to ensure that these little girls will never get
pregnant- when they are old enough to menstruate, that is.
So there they live, in these little rooms, servicing man
after man for years. Once they are
about 16 years old, some of them are allowed to go out side and “wait in line”
(the Bengali euphemism for “walking the street”). They don’t try to be sexy. They aren’t seductive.
They just stand there and service the men who purchase time with them.
This goes on for years. Eventually, when they are in their 30s and 40s, and are
considered “used up” by their pimps, they are kicked out of the brothels where
they have lived since they were children.
Some of them now have children of their own, and have to find some way
to provide for them. These women generally
wind up returning to the only job they have ever known, but in the sex district
right next to Sonagachi. There
they are turn tricks for much less money… approximately $.50 each.
People who work at the business I was with all last month
usually find these women when they are going through some kind of
transition-which usually happens when they are kicked out, either from getting
pregnant or getting too old.
Hope.
These people offer the girls and women a chance for a new
life. They have a training program
wherein they teach them how to sew along with life skills such as making and
sticking to a budget, hygiene, and parenting skills. They are taught about the love of Christ, and how He died
for them. They then spend their
days making t-shirts and beautiful bags, singing and spending time with each other. This business also has a Trust where
they give zero interest loans to the women to get them out of debt – as some of
their captivity is due to debt bondage. Many of the women have moved up the ranks and are now in
management positions.
The organization I worked for is a business, not a
non-profit. It was a really
interesting model to see- “Business as Missions”. They are a fully self-sustaining business, and that is
beneficial because-as I have learned on this trip- a difficulty that sometimes
arises is that the people whom the organization is trying to help become “NGO
dependent”.
One of the really innovative ideas that this business has is
that all of the women who work there are encouraged to continue living in the
brothel room that they came from.
They pay a reasonable rent that they work out (sometimes with the help
of their new employers). The
reason that they do this is because the founder believes that if change is
going to come to Sonagachi, it will have to come from the inside out. There are millions of vulnerable young
girls in the neighboring villages and countries. If a woman leaves her room, that just creates a space to put
another young girl into. They want
to transform the city- so that the 10,000 women living in the brothels will no
longer be working as prostitutes but in respectable jobs, making fair wages,
and with dignity. Currently, there
are 170 women working there- and the dream is that we would have 200 free women
working there as of the 10th birthday of the organization in
September.
This is where I spent my month in India.
