Prostitutes become educators in new AIDS drive

James Hall
MBABANE - A Corridors of Hope programme was launched last week to bring condoms and AIDS awareness information to road freight hauliers.
“We have lost too many valuable drivers, and the absenteeism we are seeing now shows we will lose many more. This initiative is overdue,” the manager of a trucking firm at the Matsapha Industrial Estate told FTW.
Prostitutes are being trained by the Family Life Association of Swaziland as “peer educators,” and provided with condoms and literature by Population Services International (PSI) in a programme funded by USAID. Twenty “commercial sex workers” are being posted at Oshoek border gate at South Africa, which is used by most road freight traffic to and from Gauteng. Ten “peer educators” will be attached to the Lavumisa border gate at KwaZulu/Natal, and 10 at Lomahasha border with Mozambique.
“Fifteen prostitutes will be recruited in both Manzini and Mbabane, because when truckers finish their jobs, they go to those towns,” Jerome Shongwe, programme co-ordinator for Corridors of Hope, told FTW.
In addition to promoting safe sex themselves, the peer educators will hopefully instil the message among their clients, and other sex workers.
Itinerant professionals like long distance truck drivers have fallen outside previous AIDS awareness campaigns because they are never in one place to receive messages and counselling, like other company workers.