I am seventeen years of age I am a prostitute and I don’t know how many men I have had sex with, it sounds awful doesn’t it? But here it is the norm. Nobody counts anymore, what does it matter? Nobody cares, so you just live and try to survive each day. People die here, young girls who were probably reported missing but will never be found. Sometimes this life becomes too much and they commit suicide, some die from being too heavily drugged and some of them just plain give up on life, it becomes too hard to bear so they waste away to nothingness. I do not know when they die what happens to them I don’t know where they are buried or even if they have a proper funeral. I do know that there is some mother out there grieving, hoping and praying that their child will come home but she never will.
I have learnt so much being here, I have matured, there are times I wish I could change the past but I can’t so I have to live with it and try to make the best of the situation. I say I have learnt from my mistakes but that cannot help me now, learning from it doesn’t do anything, I am still a sex slave, in a strange country, far away from my family and friends. There is no escaping this, I have no passport, I have nowhere to go, and I do not know who to go to for help. I have seen girls who have tried to run away and the police brought them back; the police, they are supposed to protect us yet they aid in our demise, they all know about it and they do nothing because it is a rich man’s trade, everyone makes money from it.
After our last conversation, I finally found the courage to call my mother, I was so scared, and two years have passed since I last heard her voice or seen her or touched her. I love my mother, even though she was often times sick and couldn’t take good care of me or give me the things I wanted, I still love her. Maybe if we hadn’t been so poor and had better daddies things would have turned out better but I don’t blame her for anything that happened to me, I blame myself. I probably rehearsed a million times what I would say to her, I practised in front of the mirror, I said the words night after night before I went to bed and it was with a beating heart that I finally dialled the number. I don’t know for sure what I expected, maybe screams that I was still alive and not dead in some gutter or maybe tears but what I got was an answer from an aunt whom I had never met . An aunt who told me Miss Jocelyn Stewart had been dead for a year now; she went to bed one night and didn’t wake up. One of my brothers had become a thief and was in Jail, destined to spend some years in Prison and the other she had taken to Clarendon with her to give him a better life. When she told me this, I felt it was my fault, maybe my mother had become so heartbroken that she had given up on ever seeing me again and just died, maybe she even blamed herself for what had happened to me.
I have nothing to live for now, I wanted to be a Veterinarian, I had wanted to make my mother proud of me, I had wanted to take her out of poverty, move her from the ghetto to uptown, Cherry Gardens. None of that is possible I am nothing but a whore, a prostitute who doesn’t even get to spend the money she worked so hard for. My life doesn’t matter anymore; nothing good can come out of it and so I am not ashamed of my story anymore, my name is not Cassandra, my name is Andrea Alethia Douglas, I was born on January 21, 1999 and soon I will die. Tell the world who I was, let women, teenagers and little girls know my story, let it be a warning to them, tell them all the graphic details, omit nothing. Tell them I could have been someone great, my mother could be alive, I could have made a difference in this world if I had not been so naïve and gullible. Do not try to talk me out of what I am about to do, you haven’t the slightest idea what it is like, living without hope, it is in the deepest, darkest hole that I live, death is like the light at the end of the tunnel, I will embrace it with open arms. There is someone else here who I think you should meet so before I pass I will give her the phone so you can speak to her, her name is Cindy, my name is Andrea, remember me.
Hello my name is Cindy, I am fifteen years of age and I bet I have been all over your television screen, I am the girl everyone is looking for, the girl who disappeared out of thin air and no one can comprehend what happened. Cindy is not my real name but for reasons which you will soon hear you will understand that you cannot publish my real name. If you something so foolish, you will draw unwanted attention to yourself, people in high places will seek you out and you will either end up dead or in this place that I am at now. I am Cindy and at present I am one of the most dangerous girls in the world.
To be continued…….
Written and copyrighted by: Aneisha A. Smith. March 21, 2016
