Evelyne Pierre features in One Day in Port-au-Prince, a multimedia documentary.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - We “picked up” Evelyne outside a bar in downtown Port-au-Prince, where she was milling around with five or six other girls, propositioning passers-by.
Peter, our Haitian cameraman, explained to her about our documentary, then walked her to the hotel around the corner for the interview. He didn’t want her to be seen driving off with foreigners. Her pimps might expect her to come back with a lot of cash.
Evelyne Pierre, 23, was adamant that she wanted to appear on camera. No hiding her identity. She wanted the world to know that young women like her only sell their bodies because they have to. After the quake, it’s the only way to survive.
“There is no one to help us, to talk about the crisis,” she said. “Since January 12, we are malnourished. We don’t eat well and we don’t sleep well.”
She took out a coin and started rubbing it between two fingers, like a lucky talisman.
“I’ve lost my mother,” she said. “The house collapsed on her. I threw my hands in the air. I screamed. Nobody answered. I have a baby with me, and I was forced to live in the street.”
Outside, torrential rain was slamming against the windows.
“Right now, while it’s raining, nobody can sleep under the tents, because when it rains a lot the water gets into the tents and you can’t sleep,” she said.
“Only after the rain stops can we go back to the tents. You have to spread a sheet on the floor with your child. The cold weather is not good, and then you’re forced to go to somebody’s house. You ask someone for a place to sleep with your child until the morning.”
Evelyne’s son is 1. The boy’s father was killed in the earthquake. Tonight, her son was being looked after by a friend in one of the sprawling camps in downtown Port-au-Prince, where more than 1.2 million people still live under canvas.
“I’m the mother, I’m the father,” she said. “I provide for myself. Nobody provides for me… I can’t find work in this country. You finish school but you can’t find work. You have a trade but you can’t find work.”
Before the disaster, Evelyne was a beautician in the southeastern town of Fond des Blancs with a diploma in cosmetics and hairdressing.
Today, she touts for business along the Rue du Centre, conspicuous in shorts and a sparkling pink top. She has tattoos on her wrists and thighs, including a couple of love hearts pierced with arrows.
“I shouldn’t be here, because God didn’t give me a body to sell it through prostitution,” she said. “I don’t have a choice. There is no prayer, no Amen. I may be suffering today, but if God wants, he can free me tomorrow. We never know in life.
“If I could find work, I would never be in this dirty prostitution game. We’re going through a lot of humiliation. People drive by in a car and we’re standing, it’s raining, and they just pass in the street and splash us with dirty water. They don’t even treat us like dogs.”
Prostitution is not illegal in Haiti, but that doesn’t mean sex workers aren’t harassed by the police.
“The police are frightening us, arresting us,” she said. “If they see that you have a child, they let you go. If you don’t have a child, they keep you and let you go the next morning, God willing.”
Listening to her story, you’d expect Evelyn to feel bitterness towards the men she says humiliate her by shouting: “Look at that whore calling to me!” In fact, she’s remarkably fatalistic.
“In spite of the humiliation, we are not discouraged,” she said. “We leave it all to Jesus. Today they might be better off, and tomorrow, God willing, we might be better off. It’s no problem.”
By the time the interview was over, it had stopped raining. Evelyne walked back into the thick air of the Haitian night to return to the pimps and sex workers by the cafe.
“My friends may have thought I’d been abducted,” she said, and was gone.
Want to send Evelyne a message? We’d be happy to translate and deliver it. Please leave a comment below.
