By Rebecca Rattner
On
her first visit to a brothel in South Sudan, Haley Wright was told in
advance only that they were going to bring a woman some medicine for her
child.
But
upon walking into the tiny corrugated metal hut, Wright knew
immediately what she was seeing. The woman inside was just over 18.
Outside
she saw young girls between the ages of 10 and 14 also living and
working in the brothel, servicing the clients who refused to wear
condoms, which are usually insisted upon by older women.
“It
really was the first time I felt evil, in my whole life—tangible evil.
It was horrific,” she told me over coffee at a hotel in Juba, South
Sudan’s capital city.
It
was only her second day of work and after about 30 minutes, Wright,
overwhelmed, had to leave. “As soon as I could get to a phone I called
my mom and I sobbed to her across the line. I was inconsolable.”
Haley
Wright, now 28, didn’t plan to move to South Sudan to work with
prostitutes when she left her native Columbus, Ohio nearly a decade ago.
Though
she says she’s wanted to work with adolescent girls since she was that
age herself, Haley’s path was circuitous. In pursuit of a dream of
becoming a foreign correspondent, she moved to London to study
journalism.
After
receiving her undergraduate degree, she worked briefly for CBS news,
but found herself moving between jobs. So at 24, Haley decided to take
advantage of an opportunity to stay with a friend in South Sudan, and
left for Juba.
Confident children out of conflict
She
spent the next six months volunteering for a local non-governmental
organization in Juba, Confident Children out of Conflict (CCC).
The
organization was started in 2007 to help street children who would come
before and after school for food and a safe place to spend their time
and leave their belongings.
Thanks to funding from international aid agencies, CCC now houses nearly 40 children and covers the school fees for 600.
These
are children, who, while not orphans, would otherwise not be in school.
The goal is to keep the boys off the streets and the girls out of the
brothels.
But
as CCC has grown, so has the number of prostitutes in Juba city, from
around 1,800 (including 200 children) in 2010, to nearly 4,500 adults
and more than 500 children today, according to Wright.
Local
NGOs like CCC are gaining favour in the development field as part of a
larger shift towards community based organizations (CBOs).
The
shift has resulted from disillusionment with traditional models -such
as Usaid and World Vision - because of the perception that they are
inefficient bureaucracies and introduce distortions into local
economies.
Unlike
large institutions with rigid procedures, CBOs can focus on overlooked
issues and respond and adjust to rapidly changing contexts, such as
sudden violence or political shifts.
Women on a mission
Wright is far from the only young woman who favours using community-based approaches to maximize flexibility.
In
2010, Sasha Fisher, 24, started Spark MicroGrants, which gives small
amounts of money, typically around $3,000, directly to communities to
fund social impact projects, which they are required to design, develop,
and implement themselves.
The
idea is to mobilize communities around an issue of their choice because
they are the best equipped to decide what they need—and because that
way the recipients become invested in their own development.
“We’ve
designed the Spark model to be flexible.” Fisher explains. “Spark’s
model is a process which can be replicated anywhere, but it varies
according to the local population’s needs and decisions.”
Spark
takes the flexibility and demand-driven stance of local NGOs and seeks
to improve and expand upon it. To date, Spark has partnered with 46
communities in Rwanda and Uganda.
A
total of 34 projects - ranging from latrines, to electricity lines, to a
honey cooperative - have been completed, and 12 are in the planning
process. None have failed.
Fisher
argues that not only is Spark’s approach effective and low risk, the
process also encourages other communal benefits, such as reducing
tensions by bringing together diverse communities, empowering women, and
making leadership structures more democratic.
Though
it is too early to assess Spark’s long run impact, all of the community
members I spoke with cited greater unity and improved communal
relations as a result of Spark’s micro-granting process.
For Haley Wright, brothels were just the beginning of her work with vulnerable girls in South Sudan.
Walking
through the largest slum in Juba in early March, Wright calmly lists
the alarmingly common forms of torture she’s researching: the binding
and brutal raping of sex workers to the point of death, coating condoms
with menthol cream so that they burn women’s skin internally during sex,
and men using their fingers to scratch women inside until they bleed,
among other horrors.
The
project, commissioned by the French Embassy, is to study child
exploitation in order to develop a child protection strategy for South
Sudan.
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
