“If I will find a normal job, I will work. I will live like a normal woman. Not like a prostitute. ” — Samanta, Sex Worker
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Kelly McEvers
I was in Baku when the new oil pipeline opened linking the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. It was early 2006, and the boom was just beginning. Construction sites were popping up all over the city. At night, the bars were full. At one of these joints I met a handful of sex workers, most of them from poor ex-Soviet republics, trying to make a living.
When I returned to Baku this year, the women I’d met were gone. My Azerbaijani friend, Olga Pukhayeva, and I tried hanging out in the same seedy bars — places where roughnecks from Scotland and construction workers from Russia troll for companionship. But trying to meet sex workers these days is difficult. Police regularly raid the bars, and the women we approached were reluctant to talk.
We heard about Samanta from a women's rights group. The group’s director told us how she had fled to Baku from Kyrgyzstan when a fundamentalist Islamic group threatened to punish her — violently — for being gay. In Baku, the director told us, Samanta had started out working the streets, then established herself as a call girl, advertising on the Internet and entertaining clients at her apartment. She was also, biologically, a man.
We met Samanta at the office of LGBT Baku, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders. A few minutes into the conversation, she told us she was no longer working as a prostitute. She was working at LGBT Baku now, she said, making tea, cleaning the kitchen, and translating documents from Russian to Azerbaijani.
It was only after hours of talking that Samanta admitted she was still doing sex work to make ends meet. In fact, while we sat with her at the office, a client called. After she hung up, she told us stories about other customers: the German who likes to dress up as a woman, the Brit who runs a cookie factory in Baku.
She took us home to see her place, a shabby, concrete, Soviet-style apartment. Azerbaijan may be swimming in oil money now, but most people in Baku still live in substandard conditions.
Samanta's sex work is irregular. Sometimes several clients come in one day. Then a week might pass where she'll see only one. Olga and I were with her when a client from Turkey called to say he was on his way. Samanta let us hide in the kitchen during the transaction. The client paid her 50 Azerbaijani manat, about $60, for an hour’s work. Because Samanta was behind on her rent, all of it went to her landlord.
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