Confessions Of A Sex Worker III - The Long Road To Redemption

All the people who bought my services came and went but Klaus, he stuck around. He came day after day to see me. For almost a year and half, he stuck around. Sometimes he would hang around the club for hours and hours unend, waiting for me to be done so he could visit with me. The girls and managers at Pink House began to call him my husband.

Klaus was a kindly gentleman. He always came just to talk, he was lonely, his wife was sick, he said. And so I talked to him, told him about the places I’d been and the things I’d seen. He particularly loved to hear about my life as a child, following my grandmother to the farm and fetching water from the stream to bathe. And he was loaded, because he always left me a fat wad of cash at the end of sitting and talking.

I began to grow fond of Klaus, he was earnest and kind. And he seemed to love his family; his sick wife and two teenage children, but the poor guy was exhausted and lost. He was afraid he’d lose his wife, and he talked about her all the time.

Oneday he said she was going to get a blood transfusion, and hers was a rare blood type, AB-negative. I blurted out, “I am AB-negative too.”

Klaus looked at me quizzically and smiled. “That’s why we’re friends,” he said.

Over the next couple of days, our conversations centered on my blood type and my health. I didn’t think anything of it. Then he asked if I would be willing to do some tests and donate blood for his wife.

“Of course I’d donate,” I said. Still thinking nothing of it.

I went with Klaus to do all kinds of tests, HIV, hepatitis and what not. I understood, I was a sex worker and posed a higher risk of having some disease. But I was cleared and donated the blood. I did find it strange that he needed my blood, because Germany has a solid blood bank reserve, and so AB-negative, though rare, was not in shortage. So I asked him what was going on.

And he came clean. He had befriended me for a particular reason. He needed a kidney for his wife. The official government waitlist was too long, his wife would die, before she had a chance. So he was shopping for a kidney. And what best people to look to than those already selling their bodies and souls?

So he asked around at the clubs, he paid a bribe here and a bribe there for club managers to divulge sensitive health data like blood types of their call girls, that way he could narrow his search down and hope for a match. And so someone had looked at my file and told him I was the same blood type as his wife.

I was dumbfounded. I felt used, I thought we had a friendship, and the whole time, he had ulterior motives! “No can’t do,” I said.

“A quarter of a million euros. You can stop this business, live comfortably. I will make sure you’re in the best medical hands. That is if you’re a match.”

“One million euros,” I said.

We settled on half a million. And I went through the motions of tests and whatnots. I was quite convinced it was a futile exercise, I was not going to match her. But I did. Mrs Klaus and I matched. They told me to stop doing drugs for at least six months.

I panicked and called my Mama, Lady K. I told her.

To my surprise, she was calm about it. She didn’t preach or chastise my poor judgment. “If for nothing at all, you will be drug free,” she said. And she told me to keep her in the loop with all the arrangements. She said she wanted to be there when I went to harvest my kidney.

A week to me being confined to the hospital in preparation for the procedure, I received a call from Sidney, Lady K’s unofficial ‘husband’,  “Your Mama had a heart attack, come home.”

I booked the next flight home to Accra, much to the chagrin of Klaus. I needed to make sure my Mama was alright. I promised Klaus I’d return and continue with our plans as soon as possible.

Imagine my surprise when Lady K met me at the airport, fit as a fiddle.

“I thought you had a heart attack?” I asked.

“Yes, and you also thought I was going to let you sell your kidney,” she replied.

And she burst into tears, “Ohenewa, do you not love yourself just a little bit? What are you going to do with all that money?”

She was right, I didn’t love myself. I did not even understand the concept of self-love. I just existed and flowed wherever the current pushed me.

Lady K dissuaded me from returning to Germany. I had been gone for four years, she had changed. A prophetess now visited twice a week to pray with her. And she tried to rope me into her newfound Christainity.

The thing about Christianity for me is, it sounds too good to be true. After all the homes I’ve helped wreck; all the men I fooled with my acting and sexual performance into thinking their wives were inferior or lazy. After all the debauchery I have partaken in, all I have to do is say, “I believe,” and I’m clean?

The other thing about Christianity is I have to forgive in order to be forgiven. I do not want to forgive my grandmother or my uncle. Can Jesus take that clause out? Like, “Hello Jesus, please forgive me my sins but can you give my uncle testicular cancer and make sure he dies a painful death? Also can you make sure he dies while his mother is alive so her wicked heart breaks?”

Will Jesus do that for me? 

Lady K and her prophetess say Jesus has the healing salve that can heal my amputated soul. But I don’t want Him to heal the part that wants my uncle to suffer, so I’m still thinking about it.

It’s been over a decade since Lady K pushed me to retire from the sex trade, after my return from Germany. I am clean from drugs. I don’t even drink alcohol, because once an addict, always an addict. But I do dabble in a boyfriend here and there, old habits die hard.

And as for Jesus, I am thinking of cracking a window open so he can stop knocking at my door and crawl through the window.