ARLETONVILLE, South Africa - Ten women are striding up a dirt road in this old mining town. Emily Ntsekawla is giggling, kicking at weeds. Gladys Nicholas, all lipsticked up, is scanning the distance. It's midafternoon. The air is clear and the ladies are going to work.
They reach an opening in the middle of the adjacent bush and take seats on tin cans. A few have condoms in the palms of their hands. There's a tall and lean miner coming just now. Nicholas chats with the miner. Then she vanishes with him into the bush, twisting like a schoolgirl.
The women are prostitutes. And out here, in a stretch of rural landscape about 45 miles west of Johannesburg, it is mean work. Malaria-causing mosquitoes are one thing; the real possibility of robbery another. But the most lethal revelation is this: Carletonville has one of the highest rates of AIDS in the world.
''In young women 25 years old and under, two out of three of them are already infected with AIDS'' in Carletonville, says Brian Williams, a researcher at the University of Pretoria who has been studying the area for the past year. ''So, two out of three girls will die before the age of 30.''
Health officials say prostitution is playing a key role in fueling the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.
But Emily Ntsekawla, a prostitute who is 22, doesn't pay much attention to statistics, or mortality rates. She's more concerned with everyday survival out here in the bush.
''Sometimes you get somebody who takes your money and runs,'' she says.
Thugs shot Ntsekawla six times earlier this year. ''I was praying that God would take me,'' she says. ''I was in such pain.''
Ntsekawla wears a crude surgically-implanted metal device in her left arm that helps heal the bones that were shattered from the shooting.
''This is like a no man's land, so you have gangsters who put themselves into a position of governing,'' says Zodwa Mzaidume, a counselor with the Mothusimpilo Outreach Project, an AIDS educational program funded by the American and British governments.
Mzaidume has been teaching the women about safe-sex practices. Mzaidume confesses she can't watch every woman going into the bush, and knows that not all of them will insist that the men use condoms.
''Nobody protects the women,'' she says. ''They are open to any type of harassment - police or criminal. Some guys even rape them.''
The women - who prefer the title ''sex worker'' - all live three miles down the road, in Leeupoort, a squatter camp that one can only enter by traversing wicked dirt roads. There is no electricity or running water in Leeupoort. Someone has scrawled ''Tigers Don't Cry'' on the side of one of the dwellings, as if to underscore that this is no place for the faint of heart. There are 150 sex workers who live in the squatter camp. Many have their children with them, kids who can be seen scooting around in the dust during the day.
''The hot stuff is 20 rand,'' says Emily Ntsekawla. ''The cold stuff is 6 rand.''
The hot stuff is sex. The cold stuff is beer. Twenty rand is the equivalent of about three American dollars.
''There's no time for intimacy,'' says Mzaidume, the outreach counselor. '' It's pay and go.''
Mzaidume is still grieving over Tstelele Phuteho. Phuteho drove the van for her program, delivering condoms to the ladies in the bush. Hoodlums robbed the condom deliverer and shot him dead in April. ''I come in here knowing very well that something could happen to me,'' Mzaidume says, after hiking into the bush one recent afternoon to check on the women.
They are never short of customers. There are three shifts of miners at nearby Goldfields Mines, which employs more than 7,000 people. Most of the miners are migrants who live in hostels on the mine company's property.
''You've got men living in single-sex hostels without their wives,'' says Williams, the University of Pretoria researcher. ''What do you think they're going to do, play backgammon?''
Mzaidume has been dispensing more than 80,000 condoms a month, trying to stem the staggering rate of AIDS infection in this area.
''When I first met these sex workers,'' she says, ''they knew nothing about AIDS or STD's (sexually transmitted diseases). It took me three months to get them to accept me.''
Xoliswa Jaho, who is 36, has worked here for three years, after arriving from Cape Town. ''I was working in the kitchen of a house,'' she says, adding that by working as a prostitute, she easily quadruples the salary she would have made continuing to work as a domestic.
Khanyisiele Hlongwene, 23, says the work is not that grueling. ''Some men look at me and discharge before they even touch me,'' she says, laughing.
Gladys Nicholas, whose family thinks she is scouring the country, job hunting, has dreams. ''My dream is always to get a better job than a sex worker,'' she says. ''I would like to have a clerical job.''
In recent months, Nicholas, Hlongwene, Jaho, and the other women here have had to dig into their savings for coffins and train fare. Three of their colleagues fell dead from AIDS. The bodies had to be shipped back to their families.
Part 1
