I met Julia* in Sao Paolo, Brazil. A Brazilian of Japanese descent, she looked like one of my aunts with her black bob and petite frame. I tried out my Japanese on her and managed to win an ounce of trust, in part through our shared heritage.
Julia was 15 when she was raped by a group of boys at her high school. They shoved her in a car and bruised her neck while forcing themselves on her. "I was very afraid for a long time," she recalls. Julia visited a hospital because of the excruciating pain and inflammation, but she never told her mother what had happened. The two didn't get along.
At 20, Julia left home and found herself in Luz, a neighborhood in Sao Paulo known for drugs and prostitution. She was invited into an apartment building where she met many women. At first she didn't realize it was a brothel, and that a woman in the building was pimping all the other women living there.
Julia learned the trade quickly. "I was new, pretty, and I made a lot of money although I was infected," she told me. The other women encouraged her to spend her money with them at bars, drinking and dancing. Sometimes the men who paid to use her body made promises they never kept.
Fifteen years passed in the brothel before Julia was thrown out onto the streets, and began prostituting herself in hotels. On the street, she met Paolo Cappilletti, director of CENA, a ministry devoted to reaching homosexuals, transvestites and prostituting women and men. For 8 years, Paolo shared the Gospel with Julia. And for 8 years, Julia ignored him.
I thought it was nonsense. He talked about Jesus, but everytime I had another reason why I didn’t want to seek Jesus. I was drinking and smoking cigarettes. I was depressed, I was empty inside.
But after 23 years of selling her body, Julia was tired of suffering. "I was tired of being a slave of Satan," she said.
To be continued...
*Julia is not her real name.
