Love through a Lens: the Lifeboat Project

Amandine Bollinger, 2010 Vienna International AIDS Conference, July 2010

The Chinese proverb “if a single member of a family eats, the whole family will not feel hungry” is commonly mistaken for meaning that if one person in the family is happy the whole family is happy. In fact this proverb addresses a different reality: if there is one person in the family who is able to provide food for themselves, it should fall upon them to take care of the rest of their family too.

What this proverb highlights is the concept of responsibility and our role within a family. The International AIDS Conference this year revolved quite deliberately around the theme of the family: the need to involve every member of the family in the treatment, care and support of those affected by HIV. Michel Sidibe, in his speech opening the Symposium on Children, concluded by saying that the family is what makes us who we are and it is about time we thought of HIV in these terms.

While it has taken some time for the International AIDS Conference to turn its attention to the family, programmes that involve the whole family to enhance the lives of people living with HIV have been common practice for some time.

The Lifeboat project is a Netherlands-based initiative started by three female activists who are also filmmakers and humanists. Lifeboat is innovative in that people living with HIV or affected by it are filmed within their family settings. Each documentary does not address a linear story but instead uses short clips to talk about various subjects. In doing so, people are able to contradict themselves, to expose opposing feelings, and in this way provide a more accurate view of the intense and conflicting emotions that are part of what it is to live with HIV.

It took two years for the first of the five families involved to build enough trust and confidence to be filmed. The participants remain very much in control of the content and of the filming throughout the whole process.

The families in the project are from Dutch, Rwandan, Zimbabwean and Romanian backgrounds. Family here means people who give love, care and support and is not restricted to blood relations. All the families faced stigma issues, which is still prevalent in the Netherlands, particularly because of the aggressive HIV prevention campaigns.

The project revealed a host of entrenched cultural realities: A man from Zimbabwe was more comfortable talking to a white Dutch doctor than to his own mother as talking to his mother would raise many taboos and might, he feared, lead to him being perceived as having failed his immediate family; the Zimbabwean family was intrigued to see how the family from Romania coped with HIV and dealt with similar experiences to them; the different understanding of and approaches to HIV of a single Rwandan mother living in Europe and a middle class white Dutch mother; the vivid reactions from a predominantly black audience at an “ethnic minority” conference on viewing the film of a white Dutch family living with HIV.

Women are very important in the project. They tend to put their children first, especially in considering the impact that an HIV disclosure could have on the lives of their children. In fact, they find that children prove extremely resilient and able to take stories of illness into their consciousness in positive and creative ways if the broader community of adults around them support that process.

The project started in 2009 and has already been extremely successful. Many participants have used it to disclose their HIV status to their families, ensuring that their families would hear the points they had to say. Doctors have used it to communicate with patients who don’t speak English by showing them a clip of another person with a similar experience. Some of the films have been used in workshops to facilitate conversations on sensitive topics with patients. The clips are available online for free, which helps them reach a wider audience.

Finally, the project has helped the wider community who took part in the project to feel that they belong to a network of families (60 world-wide) with similar challenges, and gives them the opportunity to share laughter, tears and surprises.

When asked about her motivation for the project, Manuela Maiguashca, Director of Lifeboat, answers in terms of the family:

“It’s based 100% on my experience of being a mother, being a child, and losing my mother. Little details of love and exchange – the feeling of my son’s cheeks, and thinking of his little hair under his ears. It’s very personal and intimate – details I keep only in my head. I’ve been very lucky.”

There are many little family “details” of that type that we all cherish. The gift of Lifeboat is in being able to bring these details through a camera lens, so that we see the people irrespective of their HIV status.

“Sex work is work!”

by Amandine Bollinger, Vienna, July 2010

“Sex work is work!” was a slogan much repeated throughout the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

What does that mean? Presumably, that sex workers deserve the same respect as any other individual earning ‘respectably’ their livelihoods? But is it really comparable? Sex workers sell sex, they trade their bodies for money and in doing so, they presumably disregard their self-respect. Also, how can sex work be equally respected as work when it’s so linked to drug addiction, sex addiction, violence and people trafficking?

Enter Fatimah: Fatimah is a sex worker from Malaysia. She goes by a number of different names. She is Papati to her mother, Fatimah to her husband but actually she likes to be called Selvi since a transgender gave her this suave ‘name’. She hardly fits the sex worker stereotype: she doesn’t wear a mini skirt, she doesn’t use drugs and she is at least two decades past 20. Fatimah wears traditional clothes and is a mother of five children. She speaks with kindness and respect. When she handed me her piece of paper for her presentation at the WNZ, I had no idea the woman in front of me was ‘selling her body’ as she herself calls it.

Selvi lost her father aged 5. Life with her mother and relatives was hard; she was regularly beaten up and given gruelling chores. At 15, she ran away with a man who turned out to be a violent alcoholic. She had five children and worked as a cleaner for $7 a month. She slowly followed her boyfriend’s sister into sex work, working for his family in exchange for food and clothes. Selvi was raped twice: once by her brother-in-law and once by a gang of five men. She wouldn’t report the gang rape to the police because she was scared her family might find out. One night, a client paid for a room in a hotel where there were other sex workers who took her in. She brought her children with her and settled down there.

Selvi was leaving her children with her neighbours to go to work for $1.50 a trick. She worked in brothels, on the street, and with pimps. “Working with pimps is actually a good thing, people often confuse pimps with traffickers, but in my experience, pimps take care of you while traffickers force you into sex and beat you up”. Trafficking is a huge issue in Malaysia but as Selvi explains, there are also many women from Thailand, Indonesia, Iran, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan who just want to migrate, come to Malaysia on a tourist passport and pretend to be trafficked when they get arrested. Selvi also explains how widespread sex work is in Malaysia. “For sure, there are women addicted to drugs, but there are also many ordinary women who sell their bodies. We all need money. I have ‘friends’ who are college students, nurses, lawyers, and university students. You make more money as a street worker, so everybody does it in Kuala Lumpur’. Many of them are married and still work as sex workers. Their husbands know.”

Selvi did not know anything about condoms. For all these years she had had unprotected sex. So, when two social workers invited her to a health centre and explained about infectious diseases, out of fear, she didn’t come back for her results. After several months, she went back to the clinic and was diagnosed with gonorrhoea that was quickly treated. Since then she’s refused to have sex without a condom. Attracted by the love and respect she got at the social centre, she decided to start working there.

Selvi was lucky. One of her clients felt in love with her and asked her to marry him. She said yes after two years. Hindu by birth, she converted to Islam as her husband is Bangladeshi. She says that her husband gives her respect, support and understanding.

Do you still work as sex worker? “Yes. But now I’m expensive, I’m an office girl” she says half joking. I charge $50 to $70. Your husband knows? “He’s not a problem. When we argue, I say no sex tonight otherwise you have to pay. And he pays. You need to joke to sustain a relationship.”

Selvi’s husband supported her in her work at the centre and also as a bus driver – a long-held dream. She is now on the advisory group of ANWP (an Asian network of women sex workers), and she has travelled widely throughout Europe and Asia, seeing what it is like for sex workers in other countries. “It was really sad when I visited Cambodia, because it’s even worse than Malaysia. Women are arrested on a regular basis, they have no rights and even the police are involved in trafficking”. “That’s why we need a network, so that we can support each other across countries.”

Selvi wants to start her own NGO to address the hypocrisy that surrounds sex work – sex work is punished by three years of imprisonment and much abuse takes place. Many brothels have been closed forcing sex workers onto the streets where it’s less safe. She also wants to help sex workers to know their rights so that when they get arrested, they can defend themselves.

As we are finishing the interview, my eyes catch one of the red umbrellas that are the symbols of the sex workers’ organisations at the Conference. It says: “Only Rights can Stop the Wrongs”. Wrong here is not sex work, it’s the abuse, violence, lack of respect, lack of support and love that sex workers face. It suddenly seems so clear: human rights for sex workers start by not criminalising sex work. With their earnings, sex workers are feeding their family, educating their children and paying their mortgage. Legitimising sex work would mean greater safety, the ability and right to denounce rape, violence and any other abuse, the end of extortions and arbitrary detentions, and access to healthcare and health education.

Sex workers say “we are not victims, it’s our choice so don’t rescue us!” In other words, legalising rather than victimising since after all, sex work is work.