Faith and suffering of a former prostitute
WINNIPEG, MB--For 12 to 14 days at a time, Mimi didn't brush her teeth, barely ate and survived on a steady diet of sex and crack cocaine.
"I would stand on the street corner, make my money, go into the crack house, get my drugs, smoke them as slowly as I could so I could stay warm and then go back out so I could make more money," the 29-year-old Winnipegger who spent eight years of her life in the sex trade, told ChristianWeek. "My life revolved around getting more, not feeling, not thinking."
She's been living clean for more than three years, but life is anything but easy for the fulltime university student and mother of three. She wants to educate others to the reality of sexual exploitation. Her dream is to open a home where sexually exploited youth can learn essential social skills.
Mimi arrived in Winnipeg, at age 16, addicted to crystal meth and trying desperately to get her swiftly unraveling life under control.
Throughout her childhood, says Mimi, she was repeatedly molested and raped by various men. At 13 she started drinking and smoking marijuana, eventually doing crystal meth. By the time she was 15, her friends in Vancouver were all into heroin.
Afraid of what would happen if she got into hard drugs, Mimi fled to Winnipeg where she moved in with an aunt. But it wasn't long before some new friends introduced her to crack cocaine.
On her 18th birthday, says Mimi, her uncle rented a hotel room where he and a friend sexually abused her in exchange for drugs.
"I was blindly desperate for more drugs, thinking that I was in a safe place because I was with my uncle, and it just didn't turn out to be true," Mimi recalls.
"That compromise was like the beginning of the end for me in terms of self dignity and self respect and loving my body, because up until then I could say that it was something that had been done to me, but being 18 and making the choice to compromise with a family relative for drugs--I had no self love left."
Mimi started working the streets to get cash that her abusive boyfriend used to buy alcohol.
"I lost my oldest son to CFS, [Child and Family Services]," she says. "I ended up putting him up for adoption because I couldn't get away from his dad and I didn't want him to be raised to treat women like that."
Then she got caught.
"Why are you doing this?" the police officer who arrested Mimi asked her.
"I said I started doing it because my boyfriend wanted money for alcohol or he would beat me up, and that I keep doing it because drugs helped me not to feel what I'm doing," she told him.
A fight for freedom
Because it was her first offence, Mimi was ordered to attend a two-day camp the Salvation Army runs as part of its prostitution diversion program.
At the camp she met other women like herself, trapped in a lifestyle they had learned to fear too late. But what freaked her out the most were the "hard-asses," says Mimi--women so numbed to the brutality of their existence they simply bowed to it.
"It's a very scary thing to see," says Mimi. That's when she knew she had to fight her way out.
Mimi started seeing a counsellor in Salvation Army's anti-addiction program called Anchorage where she began to unpack the residue of her childhood abuse.
Mimi says Dream Catchers, a program run by KLINIC Community Health Centre for sex trade workers, gave her the biggest boost towards recovery.
"You start off in therapy as a participant," says Mimi. "Then you're trained as a mentor; then you're there as a mentor to those who are going through therapy. You're constantly exploring where others have been, reminding yourself of where you've been and learning how to cope with life because even as you're mentoring, you're being mentored by the person ahead of you."
Someone else was there to help her too, Mimi says: God.
She was posing on a street corner one day when a car pulled up. The driver offered her $20 in exchange for five minutes. She got into the car.
"Over that period of five minutes that man took me to McDonald's, fed me and told me how much Jesus loves me," she says. "I got out of the car, went and smoked my drugs and never thought about it again for the rest of that evening. But of all the many, many men whom I have seen and talked to, he is the only one whom I remember vividly."
Since then Mimi says she's learned to look to God when things get rough.
"So many times I've been alone, and I've felt like I needed help," she says. "My connection to something outside of myself--to God--keeps me focused, keeps me hopeful."
A quest for confidence
Mimi's been crack-free for more than three years; she's raising two children, pursuing a university degree and working part time as an educational assistant.
She's often asked to speak about her experiences to Winnipeg youth at community centres and group homes, and she tells her story at the Salvation Army's john school and prostitution diversion camps.
But there's nothing easy about being a Christian for an ex-prostitute. Mimi weaned herself from crack by smoking marijuana. Pot is a much less destructive habit, she says, but one she has yet to shed.
"As a Christian I struggle a lot because I feel that on one hand I'm an addict and I have that weakness and even though I know God's overcome that, recognizing that in my life and living it out as a reality are two different things. But then walking into a church and explaining that to someone who's never lived my life…they look at you and think you don't love God or you need to change and you become their mission instead of their friend."
Mimi says she used to "soak up" the victim identity, waiting for her newfound Christian friends to fix her.
"I've gotten to the point where I'm ready to fix myself and I'm ready to let God show me how to do that," she says. "But you've got to have a certain sense of confidence to do that, and I don't have any, so I find it in God."
Sometimes her non-church-going friends are more supportive than her Christian ones, says Mimi.
"They may not be Christian, but If I'm going through a really hard time they'll throw back things they heard from me like, 'God doesn't give me anything I can't handle'…or they'll pray with me and it reminds me that I'm not alone."
From time to time Mimi attends two different churches.
"But I have to be honest, I don't feel as though I have a lot of support in that right now," she says.
"It's easy for me to be around people who understand Christ but are not perfect Christians so that I don't feel like: 'Look you get Him and you're living for Him and you're perfect, and I want to be that, but I'm so afraid that you're going to judge me if I show you my ugliness instead of help me. Or that you're going to help me and I'm going to disappoint you because I'm not going to get it fast enough.'
"But I remind myself that God speaks to everybody differently: the Holy Spirit in you--what He wants you to know, He'll tell you. What other people around me say about how I'm living is valid, and I can listen to it and accept it, but I need to always go back to the Source….My relationship with God does not look like, and should not look like the rest of my church's relationship with Him, and that's what I need to remind myself of in order to feel comfortable with where I'm at."
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