The Mocha Club Blog

We recently introduced you to our first Mocha Club project in Ethiopia: Women At Risk. Through this project, you are helping female commercial sex workers in Nazaret, Ethiopia get out of the poverty trap in which they are caught, enabling them

to start a new life. Soon, we’ll have more personal stories about individual women, but until then, we wanted to give you more background info on how life was for these women and how Women At Risk is helping…

The project was initially set up in 2003 to reach young women working in the bars that are all over the town of Nazaret.

To recruit a new cycle of group of women, “night visits” of bars and nightclubs were begun in mid January 2009. During this recruitment period of 2 months, initial contacts and relationships were built, which would help in the selection of women that would be in the 7 month long rehabilitation program.

For the selection process two criteria were in place:

• Each woman that came to the program was actively working in prostitution.
• Each woman had to show some level of commitment in wanting a lifestyle change.

If our efforts of rehabilitation are not strongly backed with a deep desire of lifestyle change by the women and from that specific target group, the outcome is questionable.

Night visits began in mid-January 2009. As a start, the counselors began to visit the girls in the bars at night, but also during the day in what is called ‘women’s house’.

“Women’s house” is usually one large room in the back of the bars that the women sleep/live in during the day, but owned by the bar owners. This is the bar owner’s way of controlling the women who work in their bars. Facilities in this one big room which usually would house as many as 10 women, is very minimal, mats on the floor, a tap outside and a drop-toilet shared with the bar patrons.

Though visiting the women in the daytime proved to be very fruitful and less dangerous for our team in terms of building good relationships and actually able to have useful conversations, opposition from the bar owners was very strong. Even to a point where couple of women who talked to us were fired from the bars.

Night visits in the bars became more and more difficult for the two-woman team of counselors. Bar owners could spot them. The women also became more suspicious; therefore making reasonable contacts became difficult.

But even through this, good contacts were made with about 21 women, and 16 of them showed some level of interest. During this final interview to select 10 out of 16 the criterion ‘Each woman has to show some level of commitment in wanting change of life style’ is very closely followed. An interview with each woman was conducted, and only 7 women showed a deeper level of commitment in wanting lifestyle change, despite the struggles ahead.

Based on our experience, we continued with the recruitment searching for 3 -5 more committed women within the next 6 weeks.

In the meantime, Nazareth Project has had a man, Abebe, who was the guard from 2003 – mid 2008 and who worked for a local church. He had already gained so much trust and credibility in the community. So Abebe became the new male counselor for Women At Risk, and together with the two female counselors, they continued with their night visits to select 5 more women. They already have established relationships with 12 women who went through formal interviews.

More personal stories on the women to come soon!