Néa Zo̱í̱ | Threads of Hope

Néa Zo̱í̱

“Néa Zo̱í̱ (“new life” in Greek) was started twenty years ago by an American missionary (she also started OM in Athens) who met a woman working on the streets. On her way to work with refugees, she met this prostitute and starting talking to her. (The prostitute) began crying and said, “No one’s ever asked what my name is before.” They went and had lunch and she said, “can you come and meet my other friends who work on the streets?” So they started meeting a lot of other women who work in prostitution, and then started going to the brothels. That was twenty years ago, so at this point, we visit about 200 brothels, which are only in this part of Athens. Néa Zo̱í̱ has five outreaches. They have a brothel team and a street team on Monday evening, Wednesday is a daytime brothel team, and there are two outreaches on Thursday night – one to Nigerian women, and one to transvestites*. We either go into the brothels or we go onto the streets and we give out sexual health advice, Christian literature, books about trafficking and stuff like that; we take tea and coffee and have a chat and say, “hey, we’re here for you if you need anything.” We have – not on staff – doctors who give us their services for free – gynecologists. We also have a counselor on staff. She mostly does member care, but if one of the women needs to see her, she’ll see them. The idea is that we just build a relationship and let them know that they’re worth it.

The countries they come from are all quite religious countries, so they know that we’re Christian. Our aim isn’t to be like, “hey, we’re Christians – stop being a prostitute”, but they know that the reason that we’re coming is because we are Christian, so they’re always really open to talking about Jesus. They know Jesus doesn’t want them here and that it isn’t right.

In a brothel, there will be a woman working and a Madame. The Madame is sort of like the house mother – she does the cleaning, she takes the money, she greets the client. The brothels here will look very much like one-bedroom apartments inside. When you walk in, you either go up the stairs or in the door, and what would be the living room now has benches all along the outside and is now the waiting room. Then there will be a doorway with a curtain, and down the corridor will be a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and then one or two bedrooms. It’s very sparse. They’re always really dark – maybe some disco or UV lights, and probably a TV with some porn playing or erotic pictures.

The woman and the Madame will wait in the kitchen until a client comes, and because there are so many brothels around and prostitution is very normal here – there’s no shame in it; it’s not weird to visit prostitutes – they’re really busy. The man will walk in, he’ll wait and see what the woman looks like, and then if he doesn’t like what he sees or if she’s busy, he’ll just come out and go to the next one, and do it all over again until he finds what he wants. Some of them don’t even want sex, they’re just looking.

Because it’s so normal, it’s not stigmatized at all. It’s like, “men have to do what men have to do.” It’s mostly Greek men because it’s very normal for Greek men to see prostitutes. But with the influx of the refugees – and there’s obviously sex tourism – you can get cheap sex here. All these refugees coming in who have never had access to sex in this way are like, “wow, ten-euro sex!” They think, why wouldn’t you? It’s not uncommon for Greek grandfathers or fathers to take their grandson or son to visit a prostitute to “become a man.” Greek men have to join the army when they’re eighteen for eighteen months, so normally they’ll lose their virginity before they go in – it’s like a rite of passage. On the Wednesday outreach, there will be men on their lunchbreak just going into the brothel together, or on their way home from work.

There are all spectrums here – we have the brothels where you can find whatever it is you’re looking for, and then we have the Nigerians on the streets if you want a black woman, and then you have the drug addicts if you’ve only got a couple of euros, or just want a woman who’s completely out of it. And then there are some hotels that women work out of, or cars, or parks.

Everyone who works at Threads of Hope, we’ve met through Néa Zo̱í̱. All Nigerian women are trafficked. All of them, because Nigerians can’t ever get a visa to live in Europe, so they have all paid money to be transported to Greece. Maybe some of them knew what they were getting themselves into… I doubt it. In Nigeria – in the towns that the women who come to Athens are from – they’re all part of the same community. It’s always a family member or a priest who sends them. There’s a thing called a juju curse, because they’re really religious. The woman will go through a juju curse before she comes where she bathes naked and she takes some of her hair or a piece of her clothing or something, which basically binds her to her fee and to her trafficker. The trafficker will say, “It will cost you sixty-thousand euros and I will get you to Europe.” They have no concept of money, so they’re like, “great.” They don’t know what they’re coming for; they just think that there’s a job for them. And it binds them to the trafficker, so when they get here, they’re put into prostitution and they will not stop until they’ve paid back the money, because they’re so terrified of this curse that they honestly believe that they or their whole family will die (if they don’t pay it back). Each of them will tell you a story of someone they know who died because they refused to pay back their trafficker. But (the curse) also means that their trafficker will not take any more than the amount that has been agreed upon.

Still, when (the women) get here, they have to pay rent, and they have to pay for food, and they have to pay the bills – and many of them get pregnant, so they have to pay for a child, too – so they might pay 500 euros a week for sharing a room with three other people. And then they also have to send money home to their family members. We have women who are sending their siblings through school, because they don’t want them to have to do this – they want better for them, so they’ll stay here until they finish.

When you’re on the streets, you know who the new ones are. You can see how scared they are, and they’ll just say, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t know what’s happened.” As the weeks go on, they just get harder and harder. Then you’ve got this community of women who are all in the same boat and don’t really want to have sex with disgusting men, but they feel like at least they’re all in it together. It’s just heart-breaking.

When we go (to the brothels/streets), we say, “God doesn’t want this for you.” And they say, “Yeah, we know, we know! God loves us, we know! But this is just for now, and hopefully, God will bless us with money and health,” – like prosperity – “God knows what I need – he’s going to send me a rich husband, and then I won’t have to do this anymore.”

So that’s for all the Nigerians we see here. And it’s interesting that things are really different in Spain or Italy or Germany. We had an Italian lady who was doing ministry in Italy, and all of her Nigerians were drugged or drunk. We never see that here – ever. It’s just bad for business. If you want to sleep with someone who’s inebriated, you go to the drug addicts and pay a fiver. But we never see Nigerians on drugs. Also in Germany, they had a huge Hungarian population of prostitutes. I haven’t seen a Hungarian prostitute in Athens in five or six years. So it’s really interesting. We just see loads of Romanians, Russians, Albanians, Moldovans, and Nigerians.”

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Threads of Hope

“At Threads of Hope, we do a training program around every six months. The team at Néa Zo̱í̱ starts thinking about who to invite to do the training – who is expressing an interest to not work in prostitution, who now has the choice to leave if they want to. We start telling people, “We know this business; you can start a training service where they teach you to sew.” You don’t have to stop being a prostitute while you’re in the training program, which is twice a week. We teach them to sew (beach bags, purses, wallets, make-up bags, aprons, etc.), we do a Bible study, we do business skills, life skills, budgeting, how to raise children – stuff like that. Once you’ve completed the training – it’s around three months – if you have finished and you’re ready to leave prostitution, we’ll always offer you a job. It’s standard living wage, and we pay for health care. Healthcare is forty-two percent, so if we pay 100 pounds in wages, we would then pay forty-two on top of that. So it’s a lot of money. But, if you are ready, we don’t subsidize an income as a prostitute. This should be your main income, because you have a desire to leave. So, we have two women going through the training program at the moment who will one-hundred percent be employed. They’ve both stopped (prostitution) already and are completely ready. One of them is about to have a baby, so it’s really fun.

The dream for these women at Threads of Hope is that they will learn how to work in a normal business. They arrive on time, they have a lunch break, they don’t have unnecessary days off, and they learn to work in an organization, so eventually they can be employed where they don’t have to be reminded every day that they used to be a prostitute. That’s what we’re here for, and it does a great job, but eventually, it would be really good for them to move on.

We are almost at the point where we sell enough products that we can pay wages through sales, but the training program is through donations and people supporting it. We want the training to be a big thing; we want to be able to invite like ten women, but realistically we can’t really do that right now because we just don’t have the money. But, we know that when we get women who are ready, God will always provide. That’s just what we’ve learned throughout the whole thing. So if there were ten women, we know that (the funding) would just come.

At the moment, this is the only location of Threads of Hope, but we dream big, and we hope that soon it will be too big to be in this office, or we can have a shopfront, or we can offer other training. For instance, Fabiana is an English speaker, but she can’t read or write English – so we’re going to do English lessons for her after the summer. *Hope wants Greek lessons because she lives here and her Greek is okay, but she needs a little extra help – so we’ll do Greek lessons for her. So even once you’re employed, the training doesn’t end. If there’s something you want to do – something you want to learn – we’ll try to provide that. *Keren has been with Threads of Hope for four years, and she’s by far our best sewer – she’s amazing at what she does. But we don’t want her to have to be bored, so we tell her, “Okay, you do the training. You can easily teach everyone, because you’re so good.” She’s just flourishing in that role; she’s just so proud of herself as well, which is what we want. *Maria doesn’t speak any English – she wants English lessons just to be able to communicate. She’s also going to do all our shipping now. Whenever we get a sale, I tell her what needs to go in the package, and she calls the company and goes to the post office. We train them in other areas, so not only can they write on their resume that they know how to sew, but also that they did sales for a year or they did training or things like that.

Most of the women (we receive) who have come out (of prostitution) don’t have any more debt to pay. They’ll only come out when they’re finished paying their debt, because we can’t pay them enough to pay back their trafficker and send money home. That’s just something that we have to deal with. They can’t come here for the money (to pay off their debt); they have to come here for a different life. For the African women, it’s impossible to come unless they’ve paid their debt. But there are shelters around which are completely safe – completely off the radar. Néa Zo̱í̱ never promotes that we will get them out of prostitution. We offer you a doctor’s appointment, or counseling, or a cup of tea and a chat, or just a Bible, but there are shelters that we can point them to (to help get them out).

Because we’ve been here for so long, the Madames and the pimps are used to us being around. We always go into the same areas, so they tell their women that we’re good people and if they need a doctor, they can call us. Most of them are really happy for us to be there, because we’re providing a service that they don’t have to pay for. The pimp won’t have to pay for a doctor or a gynecologist, because we can do it, and we don’t ever cause a problem for them. If we were to help someone leave (before they’ve paid their debt), we would just disassociate ourselves from that brothel for a few weeks or months. There are a few people who own the brothels who don’t let us in, and we just say, “Okay, we’re here if you need us, and we will probably try again next week.”

There’s a guy who owns loads of brothels in one of the areas and historically, he’s just hated us and everything we stand for. He’s never let us in any of his brothels, but in the beginning of this year, we got into a few of his brothels. We were all wondering what had happened, but we found out that he had divorced his wife and he was sick. We saw his wife and she was really friendly, so perseverance and prayer is key. So we just pray and we ask people to pray.”

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While prostitution is indeed legal in Greece, the credentials for a brothel to be legally licensed are rarely met. The owner of a brothel must be unmarried and childless, the brothel must be a certain distance from churches and schools, and the prostitutes must be healthy and go to weekly checkups. Most – if any – brothels in Athens aren’t legal, but police don’t inforce the policy because 1. They likely use the services themselves, 2. Prostitution is good for the Greek economy, and 3. They often receive bribes from pimps and owners of brothels to turn a blind eye.

“We do have a legal obligation that if anyone tells us that they are under sixteen or have been trafficked, we have to tell the police. So prostitution is legal, but not for a minor. We don’t really have a good relationship with police because they’re useless, but there are shelters around who we are friends with who we can send young women to. We are working really hard to connect with other organizations, because we’re so small and we don’t have a good budget. But organizations like Salvation Army have a massive budget, so we point women to them if they need certain things. We’re all doing God’s work, so we don’t need to be competitive. We have to know our limitations – we can provide a doctor, coffee and a chat – but if you need a lawyer to help you fight your case, we can’t afford that. We’ll support you, but we need to pass your case on to someone who can actually help you. We are partnering a lot more with people than we ever have before, which is so important.

We have 200 brothels only in the area that we work in, and we’re a team of thirty and we do five outreaches. Every time we go into a brothel, we have a man outside (because none of our men ever goes inside) and at least two women inside. There are also at least one man and two women for street work. If there are only three of us, then we might only be able to go into three brothels. If there are ten of us, we might be able to go into more. So it all depends on who we meet, the conversation we have, and how many of us there are. We definitely need more volunteers and more people.

We have a new rule that if you’re here less than three months, you can’t go on outreach, because it’s really hard. The brothels are just awful. Also, if you’re under the age of twenty, you can’t come in. It’s just really hard. I was married at twenty-two, and when we came in 2010, I did three outreaches on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and it was fine for me. But some people say, “I can do one outreach a month.” Because it’s really hard. So we have to be really sensitive.

There’s a really big training program you have to go through now – you have to see a counselor, you have to learn about what it looks like, how it is; you have to tell us how you feel about porn or if you have a history of sexual abuse that’s going to trigger you or be a hindrance for you. We have some teams who come for a week, because there are things that they can do. We just had a team here for a week and they did the painting (in the office) and some sorting out for us. At Threads of Hope, you can come for a week and cut out product for us, or do some shopping for us, or you can just hang out with the women and do a Bible study.

Americans can only get a three-month visa, but of course we want you to come. You probably won’t do outreach, but you will still be helping. If you want to come for a year, that would be more helpful. English is only helpful on the Nigerian outreach, but if you speak Bulgarian, or Russian, or Albanian, we want you. Please come! We want people to come because we want them to buy our products, since that’s how we pay wages. OM sends people all the time, and they just want to hear about the ministry. So, there’s always a place for people who feel like God is calling them to come help us.”

*Most of the transvestites in prostitution here are Greek or Algerian. Amanda said that ninety-nine percent of the time, the transvestites have they meet have come to identify as such because of childhood abuse. They were raped by family members or close friends who would tell them in during every sexual encounter,“You are a girl. Girls like sex.” So, when they were old enough to make their own decision, they chose to become a woman.

One older man whom Amanda had met during ministry had been living as a woman for years, and began coming to the church that Amanda and her husband attend. One year he came up to her and said, “God told me to stop smoking,” so he did. A few years later he said, “God told me to stop doing drugs,” and he did. Years later he said, “God told me to stop being a woman,” and he has been living as a man ever since. “So, you never know. There is no method. All you can do is accept them and show them love tell them their true worth, and let God do the rest,” said Amanda.

*names changed for protection