These are the words of Sekai, 19, who left Zimbabwe with her friends filled with great expectations of a better life. But problems began before she had even crossed the Limpopo River.
“We didn’t have passports, so we had to pay a Zimbabwean immigration officer for papers to cross the border. We sold our cell phones and everything we had,” she says. They ended up crossing the border disguised as student nurses.
Sekai was soon to find out that the grass was not greener on the other side of the Limpopo. Just after arriving in Musina, she experienced what was to become her life in the new country – hopelessness and poverty. She was left stranded and penniless at a garage where she and her friends had been dropped off.
Faced with the reality of needing a place to sleep and something to eat, offering sex for money seemd the only option. It is not a new challenge facing women who cross into South Africa in search of a better life. Yet every case has behind it the ugly face of a state that is stripping the dignity of its people and dehumanizing them.
In Johannesburg she was physically and emotionally abused by her boyfriend but stayed with him to save living expenses. According to Lawyers for Human Rights, it is desperation that makes these women continue to suffer such abuse.
Many end up as single parents because most of their partners run away from their parental responsibility.
According to a spokesperson from Raima Moosa Hospital in Johannesburg, two thirds of single mothers who come in are Zimbabweans. “They come because it has free service and we do not discriminate against them,” he said.
Adilia de Sousa, Director of Bienvenu Shelter where women receive shelter when they have nowhere else to stay, observed that many are quite educated. Some are qualified nurses or teachers. The economic crisis in Zimbabwe has meant that professional women have had to take jobs as domestic maids or cleaners.
In order to gain employment in their field, they have to have their qualifications vetted by the South African Qualifications Authority, which requires upfront payment and takes time. More often than not, they do not have the money or paperwork required.
Thus a former teacher or nurse who used to have respect in her community, dignity and hope finds herself vending or doing domestic work. Those who succeed in gaining work often face deplorable conditions and are usually under paid. Sekai, thankful for some sort of employment, worked as a waiter where she was overworked with pay levels that made it impossible to improve her standard of living.
Although they live in abject poverty, South Africa is still better than going back home. At least here they have some access to proper medical care.
When we met her, Sekai, who now lives in Durban, had come to Johannesburg to confirm the status of her permit. “After a year in South Africa, I applied for asylum papers. I told Home Affairs that I was running away from political persecution,” admitted Sekai.
Like thousands of Zimbabweans, she has applied for a work permit through the special documentation process and is waiting with confusion and anxious anticipation for Home Affairs to respond to her application.
Without proper identification papers, these women cannot register their babies for a birth certificate. The Millennium Development Goals allude to universal registration of children as a target for all UN Member States. This is because children who are not registered fall through the cracks of service delivery – caught in an ever deepening poverty cycle of endemic and inter-generational poverty.
Sekai, now a 24-year-old single mother, has had to sell her body to buy food and pay rent for her and her child. “I want to send my child back home to Zimbabwe, far away from the seediness of my life in South Africa,” she says. – By Regina Pazvakavambwa, Media Assistant in the Regional Office. Additional reporting by Tafadzwa Maguchu, Programmes Assistant.
“We usually do not see prostitution as domestic violence because it is just too painful. The carnage: the scale of it, the dailiness of it, the seeming inevitability of it; the torture, the rapes, the murders, the beatings, the despair, the hollowing out of the personality, the near extinguishment of hope commonly suffered by women in prostitution." – Margret A Baldwin
Post published in: News