Brenda, a Unisa student, battled to get a part-time job to support her baby boy and was baffled how her friends seemed to have everything a woman could want.
“They had money, cell phones and expensive clothes: all the things a girl likes,” she recalled.
When she asked her friends how they supported themselves, they all told her the same story, they were selling their bodies.
“I was shocked. But even though I knew this was a difficult way to get money, I wanted to try it. I could use the money to support my child.”
With her mother looking after her son in Umlazi, Brenda, who had been studying psychology, agreed to go along with a friend’s suggestion to share a flat in Point’s red-light district.
“We were to share the R350-a-week rent and she would teach me how to keep the good life going.”
In prostitute-pimp parlance, Brenda would be “doing the business”. But every time she went on the street, she would feel guilty and wonder what her mother would say about her new lifestyle.
The rate was R100 “for everything” and she could make R500 on a good day. Her customers were mostly black clients from Johannesburg and elsewhere in Africa. Soon she gave up her studies.

Brenda was HIV-positive before beginning her life on the streets and although she generally used a condom, there were times when she didn’t.
Brenda met her clients in clubs and took them back to her flat.
Sometimes, she gave them knock-out drops, so that she could rob them.
Brenda made a lot of money but she also spent a lot. For not only was she hooking, but also “ smoking rock”.
The 20-something woman turned to the drug after the death of a boyfriend, believing that it would help with the stress she felt. But it made things worse, because she was spending more money – and eventually all of it – on rock to try to cope.
“It’s an expensive drug. You can spend R1 000 in 30 minutes.”
Eventually, she stopped sending money home to her mother and son.

Sometimes the police used to “do business” with some of the street girls, she claimed.
“Were they off duty?” we asked.
“Sometimes they were on duty.”
Brenda met American missionary Sister Petra Luna whilst she chatted to prostitutes on the streets.
Luna is a volunteer at the Life-Place Care Centre mission in Pickering Street, run by Doctors for Life International.
“We wondered why she was wasting our time talking about Jesus. All we were thinking about was getting money to smoke drugs,” recalled Brenda.
But Luna, who used to work with prostitutes and vagrants in New York’s famous Times Square, was persistent, telling the girls there was another way “and that way was Jesus”.

Meanwhile, Brenda, who seldom ate, was getting thinner and increasingly depressed about her lifestyle.
“I was confused. I would cry every day. I didn’t like sleeping with men.”
The future looked bleak and she knew if she stayed on the streets, she would end up dead. Perhaps a man she had robbed would take out a gun and shoot her, she said.
In the two years she had been hooking, she knew 10 girls who had died, either from Aids or the effects of an illegal abortion.

Finally, one November, she knew she wanted out and took the first step, by going along to one of Luna’s services at the Life-Place mission in Pickering Street.
“As Sister Petra preached, I knew what I had been doing was wrong. I decided that maybe this sister could help me.”
Brenda stayed behind after the service and told Luna her feelings. After being counselled, Brenda quit her lifestyle there and then… later she went to the Doctors for Life International mission at Kranskop, north of Kwa-Dukuza (Stanger), for further help.

“I came back a totally changed person. I am now a child of God. I don’t belong to the Point environment.”
She has also given up the drugs that were destroying her life.
“I told myself I wasn’t born smoking drugs, so I can live without it.”
Now a born-again Christian, she has returned home, where her father supports her and her son. But she is hoping to take advantage of a skills training course being run by the Joshua Generation organisation in Durban.
She has declined all offers of antiretroviral drugs to fight Aids and says she is recovering and believes it to be “a miracle”. Now that she is eating properly, she is putting on weight.
Brenda believes she is an example to other prostitutes, proving that it is possible to give up the life.
“My life is so much better now. I am recovered. But you’ve got to want to leave the lifestyle,” she said.
Brenda does not think too much of men and has decided to abstain from sex.
“I don’t even have a boyfriend she says.”