Salgaa, a muddy truck-stop on the Kenya-Uganda highway, exists for one reason alone: sex. Its 300 prostitutes charge lorry drivers as little as US$1, but the human cost is astronomical, reports Kevin Toolis
Mud - thick, cloying, unrelenting, foot-sucking mud. It gets on your shoes, your clothes, your arms, your hands. After a day it's thick in your hair, your armpits, everywhere on your body. It's worse in the morning after the heavy trucks have churned what passes for Salgaa's streets into a solid torrent of wet sticky earth. Take the wrong step and you plunge knee-deep; slip, and you'll end up taking a mudbath.
But no one complains as Salgaa exists only because of the trucks and the money their drivers spend. Salgaa, a truck-stop on the main Kenya-Uganda highway, is really just a big whorehouse. The entire town is built around the sex trade: there are 21 bars, four VD clinics, and 300 prostitutes in a total population of 2,000. Without the women, the drivers wouldn't stop, the bars would be empty and so would the butchers, the bakers and the bicycle repair shops that rely on the cash-for-sex exchange to fuel Salgaa's booming economy.
Everyone learns to live with the mud, just as the prostitutes learn to live with the ever-present danger of the HIV virus. You can take care, but you cannot avoid it. There is no escape. In the era of an AIDS holocaust, the average working life expectancy of a Kenyan prostitute is just seven years. Every one of those women, in their late teens and early 20s, is already working out a viral death sentence. Almost all of them will die long before their 30th birthday. And so too will many of their children, perishing without the support of their mothers.
You won't find Salgaa on any tourist map; it's not even listed. Officially, it doesn't exist. Five years ago it was empty bush. But like a Wild West town, it has exploded into being through its own desperate economic enterprise. Kenyan truckers don't like travelling at night because of robbers on the highway. They started stopping at Salgaa and the trade, and the town, followed the trucks.
Not that Salgaa is much of a town. There is electricity, but the water supply is haphazard and the sewerage non-existent.
From the highway all you can see is a sprawl of bar signs - the Good Times Hotel, the Eagle's Nest, California, the New Paradise Hotel - and the churned field of mud that passes for a kind of civic centre. But every Kenyan and Ugandan truck driver knows where Salgaa is: close to the town of Rongai and just south of the main highway turn-off for Tanzania. As dusk falls the trucks pull in and the sides of the highway turn into a solid wall of parked vehicles. The bars spring into life as men and women, in the oldest human exchange, meet to trade for sex. The air is filled with the smell of beer, frying meat and a sweet blend of sweat and soap.
Sex, by western standards, is cheap. It can be bought for US$5, $2, $1, maybe even some second-hand clothes, depending on the hour, the desperation of the woman, and the desire of the man. Prostitution is disguised in a casual boyfriend/girlfriend bar-room relationship. The women go to the bars, buy themselves a soda, and then flirt with the drivers, hoping to be bought a beer. Later, if she's successful, the woman will go to the driver's lodgings for sex.
"You have to be careful not to get too drunk otherwise you will not remember the condom. You have to get him to show you that he's put it on. Men are all the same. And as long as they are running the highway all the time, you do not know where he's slept and who with," says Susan Gachacha (21). Everyone in Kenya knows about AIDS. It is everywhere, cramming every hospital bed, touching every family in the land, stripping the rich and the poor of their brothers, mothers, fathers and sisters. Officially, AIDS has been declared a national emergency by President Arap Moi. AIDS stares out of the two daily pages of obituaries that fill the back of every newspaper.
There are lots of slang words such as "mikingo", meaning "slow puncture", or "kauzi", meaning as "slim as a thread", that describe the disease's deadly wasting process. It's hard to ignore because 250,000 Kenyans, out of a population of 29.5 million, died of AIDS last year.
But knowing about AIDS and acting on that information are two different things. Kenyans are still in denial about the catastrophe that is destroying their society. Only one person in Kenya has publicly died of AIDS. "The custom is to say that someone died of 'a long illness bravely borne'. They don't want to say this is AIDS because AIDS is related to sex, and sex is a taboo," says Martin Odondo, an AIDS worker with Action Aid and the American Centre for Diseases Control.
And it's the same in Salgaa. Everyone says they use condoms all the time, but somehow the four VD clinics are never short of business. "Most of the time I insist on using a condom, but with one or two more regular customers I will accept not to use a condom," says Sharon Chemtai, a shy 18-year-old. Chemtai really does not have much choice. In Kenya, like most societies, money and power lie in the pockets of men. If you're selling your body for $3, how much negotiating power do you really have when the customer insists on not using a condom?
"A lot of the Arab drivers from the coast like anal sex and they are the ones who particularly insist on not using a condom," explains Chemtai.
Like prostitution everywhere, it's hard to draw an exact line between money, emotion, dependence, straight cash-for sex and longer-term episodic sexual relationships. Some customers do become "regular" boyfriends, and the prostitutes are more likely to concede to not using a condom.
KENYA is poor. The average income is $300 a year, the birthrate is high, and so is unemployment. The government is riddled with corruption and its treasury is floundering in an ocean of western debt. Chemtai and Gachacha are the human casualties of these distant forces. Like all the women of Salgaa, they were driven into prostitution by economic destitution.
"Everyone who has come to this place has trouble," says Chemtai. "No one wants to do this. It's wrong. If there was another way to be lived it would be better. And stop this. But sadly there is not anything. There is no profit. We are risking our lives, but there is no alternative."
As the youngest daughter of her father's last wife, Gachacha was always going to be at the bottom of the merciless Kenyan economic heap. While she was still at secondary school her father died, and then her mother. She, and the burden of her school fees, automatically became the responsibility of her reluctant grandmother.
Gachacha's rebellious nature did not help the situation; nor did getting pregnant with her daughter, Angela, at 17. She was expelled from school and left the family's village soon after. For a time she found sanctuary with some Catholic nuns, but that road eventually ran out. She started working as a prostitute in Salgaa when she was 19.
Home for Gachacha and four-year-old Angela is now a four- by six-metre wooden shack, lined with old newspapers to block out the light and the rain. A curtain down the middle divides the tiny space into a bedroom and a living area that can just about seat three people. Piled in the corner of the immaculately clean dwelling is the kitchen - a bundle of pots and pans for cooking outside over a wood fire.
Gachacha's shack is in the corner of a compound of 15 other shacks. There is one water tap, which does not work, two showers and four stinking pit latrines for around 30 people. Every night Susan leaves Angela sleeping and goes to work.
In a mud-walled hut behind the Small Time Bar we found Monica Murugi (32), a former bar girl and bar owner, in the final throes of AIDS. She lay prone and exhausted on a battered sofa, her yellowish skin scarred from a rash and her body wasted. Having suffered repeated bouts of pulmonary tuberculosis and pneumonia during the past year, she was days from death.
It was a difficult interview. At one point, her brother, Peter Kinuthaa, rushed into the room and insisted, in public at least, that his sister's TB was "improving". He could not bring himself to mention AIDS. Even in Salgaa, Murugi had been made the family outcast. The previous night, Kinuthaa had travelled 400 kilometres from the family farm for Monica's impending death. It was only later, in private, that he felt able to speak freely and voice his own despair.
"We are being shunned. To cope with that you have to close your eyes and ears and wait for what will happen next. You cannot kill yourself, commit suicide or migrate. I am now the only one who supports the whole family. You cannot cater for everyone. She is economically exhausting us. There is no more money for the medical bills," he says.
Inevitably, Salgaa and the other truck-stops like it are the engines of an epidemic; an amplifier of the AIDS holocaust that has infected an estimated 14 per cent of Kenya's population. The trucks barrel down the highway carrying tea to Mombasa, machinery to Uganda, exotic flowers and vegetables to Nairobi for overnight air freight to Europe.
They also carry the AIDS virus circulating in the bodies of the drivers and their assistants. But blaming the men for buying sex is naive and simplistic. Many Kenyan drivers spend two weeks on the road driving in harsh conditions and sleeping in squalid hotels. Inevitably, some men will, through drink, loneliness or lust, buy themselves sex - and some comfort - on their endless journeys across the African savannah. It's not sex, commercial or otherwise, that is killing Kenyans, but a tiny piece of genetic material, the HIV virus.
Trying to change private sexual behaviour is almost impossible. Martin Odondo (34) began training in AIDS counselling work in 1987, along with 19 co-trainees. More than 50 per cent of that small and elite group have since died of AIDS.
"People are aware, but you have to ask yourself what is that awareness," says Odondo. "It is very difficult to explain that there is a small thing that moves from one person to another. It then stays in that person for a very long time. And then becomes big. I would say that AIDS is a thinker's disease. You have to think about it all the time. Think about how you might get infected, even when you're drunk, when you're feeling 'hot', when you want to have sex right now. Because if you assume it's not there, then you are going to get it. I go to the bars, I dance, and at the end I go home because I know it's there."
Using condoms can slow, but never halt, an epidemic that is fuelled by basic poverty.
"You can't look at AIDS in isolation," says Dr Chris Ouma, Action Aid's national Aids co-ordinator. "It's poverty that drives these women into prostitution. It's poverty that strips them of the power to decide when, where and how they have sex. A woman cannot decide. It's the customer who decides. There are a whole lot of issues involved, such as debt relief and macro-economic issues about trade. If we could address some of those macro issues, then we could start. The girls wouldn't have to come here because there would be other jobs. I know that's hopelessly idealistic, but those are the real issues that create places like Salgaa."
Just before dawn, Sharon Chemtai and Susan Gachacha leave whoever they are sleeping with and go home to their shacks to wash, sleep, and wait for another night. On the highway the truck engines roar into life and depart in a blast of smoky exhaust. Salgaa is an unpredictable place.
Everyone is living on borrowed time. No one knows what or who the highway will bring to town tonight. Or for how much longer their own lives will last in the face of Kenya's AIDS holocaust.