Last night (Tuesday) I was taken to a place called "Tema Station" which is basically a huge parking lot where thousands of women and children sleep. I was unable to take any pictures, but I need to write some of this down so that I never forget
I sat down with a group of about 20 of these women ages 12-20 and was able to ask them some questions about how they live and what a normal day looks like - here's what I found out:
They work between 12-15 hours a day, some days they literally make $0, sometimes they make as much as 6 cedi's ($4). They get up at around 3am to prepare for their work - 7 days a week (that's 84-105 hours a week)
All of their money is spent on survival - food, small bags of clean water to drink, a shower every once in a while
They literally sleep on the concrete, some of them have a blanket to lay on
They hang out in small groups for protection. One person from their group is always awake and when someone comes and tries to rape one of them, they all wake up and attempt to fight him off
When they get desperate enough for food, they will sleep with a man to eat - we call this prostitution, they do it to survive
There was a really young girl in the group (I'm guessing between 7-10) I asked her how old she was and she had no idea - she couldn't even guess
The hardest part for me was that these girls seemed completely normal. They weren't drug addicts, they weren't prostitutes on a street corner, they were teenagers trying to survive. They're somebodies daughter and they talked to me like I was their friend
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