When ships carrying thousands of US servicemen sailed into the former US naval base in the Philippines' Subic Bay for routine port calls during the 1980s, it was not just the shore crews who were ready for their arrival.
Greeting them was blasting rock music from hundreds of bars in nearby Olongapo City, and inside were thousands of call-girls waiting for their next uniformed "trick."
Among them was Minda Pascual.
"The bar owners would announce that a big ship was coming in and they always said that we should look our best for the customers," Pascual recalls.
It was a reception the seamen eagerly awaited after months at sea. But behind the parties and the colorful neon lights, and hidden by the girls' smiles, make-up and scandalously short skirts, lurked intense misery.
Most of the 16,000 women estimated to have worked the bars around the largest overseas naval base were forced into the sex industry.
Far from the lip-glossed world of Suzy Wong and the other "happy hookers" of fictionalized Asia, the experience of Pascual and her colleagues was anything but fun. During eight years as a call girl in Olongapo and the capital Manila, Pascual says she was raped, beaten, forced into drug addiction and driven to the brink of suicide by abusive clients, pimps and bar owners.
"I would have to take drugs because I could not accept what they would do to me unless I was high," she said of her days as a sex worker, when she masked her pain through marijuana and methamphetamine hydrochloride, a stimulant popularly known as "shabu" or "ice."
"If I didn't have drugs I couldn't work. I couldn't dance or loosen up enough to show my body," she said. "Every time I felt depressed, I felt suicidal. But every time I used the drugs and alcohol, I felt happier."
Pascual has since pulled herself away from the vicious cycle of poverty that beats a well-trodden path to prostitution. Now she counsels younger women who face similar prospects in an industry that, despite the US pull-out from Subic Bay in 1992, continues to fester, catering to a new generation of civilian sex tourists.
Her mission brought her to Hong Kong last month for the WTO summit to highlight the problem of human trafficking and violence against women in the sex trade.
She knows too well the despair that sucks the helpless women into this life. Twenty years on, Pascual still sheds tears when she tells her story.
Heady dreams
Born in the southern part of the main Philippines island of Luzon, Pascual was 16 when she began working the bars, fresh out of high school and with heady dreams of becoming a restaurateur.
She asked her aunt for help in getting her a job. The aunt sold her to a man who pimped her to a massive nightclub of 3,000 girls in Olongapo in return for a cut of her first four months of "wages."
Pascual's "training" was brutal. She was locked in a room for a month, starved and force-fed drugs and alcohol to ensure she was addicted and could be more easily controlled. She was often beaten unconscious for refusing to have sex with customers.
During her years working the bars, Pascual had five abortions and bore three children by different strangers. She made almost no money as what little she earned was spent on food, babysitting, rent and pay-offs to corrupt police to prevent her being arrested.
Leaving the job was not an option.
"I had no choice and needed money and food to survive. I had no dignity. Mys elf-esteem was very low," she said.
Her aim now is simple: to spare other young women the misery she endured.
"I have to make myself a role model and show them they too can survive without being a prostitute," said Pascual, who visits sex workers in her old stomping ground and tries to persuade them to leave the seedy life behind.
"I know this is a slow process but I want to give them hope and make them realize there are other ways to live and other kinds of jobs they can do," Pascual said.
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
Gaza is rapidly running out of its limited fuel supply and stocks of food staples might become tight, officials said, after Israel blocked the entry of fuel and goods into the war-shattered territory, citing fighting with Iran. The Israeli military closed all Gaza border crossings on Saturday after announcing airstrikes on Iran carried out jointly with the US. Israeli authorities late on Monday night said that they would reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza yesterday, for “gradual entry of humanitarian aid” into the strip, without saying how much. Israeli authorities previously said the crossings could not be operated safely during
RSS