tonight on the track was frustrating. well, every night is frustrating. what an overwhelmingly beautiful and wonderful place to be able to enter into and speak to girls in the midst of. but there are some weeks that you are reminded, ever so severely, the dark world prostitution and trafficking is. we might only have to step into it once a week, but these girls live it.
tonight on the track we ran into a whole lot of girls. it was almost easier to just keep walking down the street rather than get back in our car and continue driving down the track. girls were everywhere! but what was strange was how spread out they were - few of them were clustered together. they were each individually standing on their own street corner watching each car as it drove by. as we approached some of these girls to try and offer them a gift bag or strike up conversation is became clear all at once that these were new girls that were being broken in - getting turned out for the first time. they were trained very well. they were too new in the game to be comfortable speaking to or making eye contact with a stranger. and if you paid close attention you could see the pimps and runners not very far away keeping a close eye on their behavior.
we even ran into one girl with a broken arm. she refused to talk to us and even tried to run across the street to get away. although, now that i think about it, i think she was attempting to get away from the man that was behind us. because this man walked with her down the street several blocks "sweating" her - trying to catch her "out of pocket". i can't help but wonder how her arm got broken in the first place. was it really an accident? was it some form of punishment? was it a trick gone wrong? these women are put in such dangerous situations.
i know these things happen all of the time. i know these girls get treated horribly - but sometimes it is easy to forget when you don't see the ramifications all the time and they are so good at greeting you with a smile - telling you everything is going just great!