Email: Kristin Black

This isn’t the end of everything

“Mama, we’re hungry.”

But what can mama give when she receives less than a third of her day’s earnings while her employers bask in two-thirds glory?

“Mama, we’re hungry, can we have something to eat?”

But what can mama give when she works through the night, body aching, burning, itching until the blazing morning sun rises above the jagged shantytowns. Again, she must seek courage to face another night, possibly a lifetime of this, just to survive.

“Mama, please, we’re really hungry, please give us something to eat.”

But Mama feels empty. Desperate to love her children and be loved by someone who accepts her for who she is, not what she does.

Mama is a prostituted woman.

There are 6,000 prostituted women in Davao City alone. Of these, 2,000 are “registered,” which means a government-sponsored social hygiene clinic provides a “pink card” indicating the status of a woman’s pap smear. Usually, she is tested every two weeks. The clinic across the street from the drop-in center teems with girls, ages 14-41, from the time it opens at 8:30 a.m. until it closes at 5:00 p.m. If the result is negative, the pink card is handed over with a doctor’s signature; if it’s positive the client’s number is called and a terrified woman disappears into the inner chambers of STD (sexually transmitted diseases) diagnoses.

Maria is a prostituted woman. She “works” in a massage parlor. Some say she has “magic hands.” She is very clear about what she will and will not do, but sometimes the men ignore her and demand whatever they want, even when she is menstruating. She claims foreigners are gentler than Filipinos. She fell in love with one.

He is from Canada, she showed me a photograph of the typical white-skinned Westerner slightly bulging at the belly. He is funny, honest, treats her well. I don’t know if he was the one who sent her a text saying, “Your eyes are the color of my Porsche.” She thinks maybe she loves him and that he might love her too.

Love cannot be bought.

Maria wants to find her daughter’s birth father, an American man who abandoned them when her child was 4 months old. This child is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever met. Maria has no idea where the father of her first child is, a quiet, gentle boy in his first year of elementary school. She pays a pitiful sum to a kind older woman willing to watch her children while she ventures into the night to sell her soul again.

Prostitution is the ultimate betrayal of women. Centuries ago, mystery and reverence graced their confident bodies, coursed in their blood, danced through their feet. Then the Spanish arrived with the sword and the cross, slashing temples, raping women, and condemning as sin what was a woman’s joy. Here began the perilous journey down a road of inequality, subservience, and suffocation of women’s truth in this country.

The Americans came later. They set up military bases. Women flocked to those locations and prostitution flourished. The Japanese battered in during World War II, leaving rivers of bloodshed and despair. Women today are still fighting for justice and compensation for their use as “comfort women” (women repeatedly raped and tortured) for Japanese soldiers. When they left, the Americans returned. Even today, with the arrival of American troops participating in joint military exercises with the Filipino military, women flock to this tiny island for the promise of foreign dollars.

Most judges, police, men, condemn the prostituted woman. She is of bad moral character and highly promiscuous. But the majority of these girls come from rural provinces languishing in extreme poverty. Their only crime is being poor. Since when is being poor a crime? Sometimes recruiters stake out territories, especially after major disasters like typhoons or bombings, awaiting the opportunity to exploit poverty’s vulnerability. They promise the family and girl legitimate employment (in a factory or as a domestic helper) and a salary far beyond the few measly pesos jingling in ragged jeans. They are lies, lies that violate women’s bodies for pleasure, for pesos, for power.

These are our daughters, sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers. When one woman suffers, we all suffer. There is an emptiness in their eyes, a resigned helplessness in another day of “dancing” or “massaging” in short skirts, bikini shirts, tight dresses, mesh scarves or nothing at all. I have met children as young as 14 who know nothing but how to undress and bare their hardly developed bodies to greedy hands. I have met women as old as 40 who know nothing but paid rape and desolation and rejection.

As Maria gathered her denim jacket and pink card, she told me, “This isn’t the end of everything.”

Kristin Black