In the east end of the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, Doris Bilonda takes a filthy 200-franc note (40 cents) and is pushed in her wheelchair into her bamboo partition. Living in a breezeblock barn built by the government "pour handicaps physiques sinistres", it is the best price Doris, 34, a pregnant mother of four, can get: one foot was ruined by polio and, worse, she insists on using a condom.
The next morning the Londoners, together with older women such as Doris, wait by a shabby building in the slums. Run by Médecins sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders), the clinic at Matonge is the only one for thousands of sex workers among the 7 million inhabitants of Kinshasa. Clutching cheap handbags, they tell tales of exploitation. Two prostitutes aged nine and 10 accept less money than the usual $1 because they haven't yet developed breasts; pupils at a school get good grades if they sleep with their teacher: 8/10 if they agree not to use a condom but only 6/10 with protection.
Kinshasa in the wet season is forbidding. Stinking rubbish and rough plots of maize border the army barracks. Orange Kombi vans with portholes hacked in the sides are crammed with passengers. But sweaty expat subcontractors sizing up young girls apart, this is not the moral ruin of Joseph Conrad. It is economic ruin. After decades of dictatorship and a civil war that killed 3.8 million people, millions have no jobs and no cash and yet must pay for schooling and healthcare. Everything is for sale, piled into pyramids by the road: stones and maize, phone cards and pineapples, fanbelts and sex.
In the Savannah bar white men slump in chairs while black women hover at the bar. "I lost my parents, I had no one to support me," said Judith, 21, an ex-student. "I met another girl who told me: 'You are pretty, I will show you where you can get money easily.' That's when I began what I do here. Unfortunately I am not happy, but it's my life."
As a Londoner, Judith can earn good money. She tips open her handbag and eight condoms fall out. She claims that she always makes her clients wear them. So does Blandine Ketuange-Mawete. But the 24-year-old, who looks like a demure British clubber in her white vest and hoop earrings, is receiving treatment at Matonge for a sexually transmitted disease. About 12% of the sex workers test positive for HIV at the MSF clinic. Officially 4.2% of Congo's adult population has HIV/Aids. Health workers fear the true figure is much higher.
"I've never met anyone who says they have chosen prostitution for reasons other than poverty, and the sex worker population is growing because of it," said Françoise Louis, HIV programme coordinator for MSF in Kinshasa. "Many sex workers are hidden - students and housewives who have sex for food. Their family does not know they are sex workers."
A key player in the transmission of HIV in Kinshasa is "the Love", the boyfriend/pimp who lives with many of the working girls. Natalie Mangassa, 24, and Safia Bahavu, 26, are among 60 young women who use grubby mattresses laid on the concrete floors of Hotel Muma in the city's east end. The two brothers who own the hotel say they simply charge clients $5 for a room, but one admits he also has sex with the girls.
Natalie and Safia use condoms supplied by MSF with their predominantly Congolese punters but admit that they don't use them with their Love. Most Loves keep four or five prostitutes and sleep around.
Later this year an MSF project in Kinshasa will treat about 1,000 prostitutes and target their Loves, urging both to use condoms. MSF will also expand the provision of antiretroviral drugs to sex workers with HIV. Seven prostitutes have recently been put on ARVs. Some are now well enough to seek new jobs and a way out of prostitution. While working girls are snapping up the free condoms, the resolve of self-confident Londoners such as Judith is limited when customers resort to money or violence.
Pregnant, disabled prostitutes such as Doris Bilonda have even less power. She claims to insist on condoms, but most of the 30 sex workers among the limbless women living in Kinshasa's disabled barn cannot make such a demand. So they continue to dice with death to earn "big money" - $2.
