Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  After she had finished picking at her food, Betsy plucked Faith from Sister Rita’s arms and swaddled her in a long African print scarf which she tied onto her back. She then walked up and down the halls of the shelter, humming an African lullaby.

  The women at Casa Ruth speak Nigerian Pidgin, which is a conglomeration of various African dialects and the English language. It is a language Sister Rita does not speak, though at times it seems quite clear that she understands it. She tries to teach them Italian instead. Usually, when women first come to the shelter, the only words they know in Italian are terms for blow-jobs and sexual positions, which makes for unusual conversation between the nuns and the women. But Sister Rita cannot be shocked – she has heard and seen it all. They initially communicate using universal hand signs for sleepy, thirsty, hungry and other basic needs. Then one of the other women who speaks Italian translates each newcomer’s story so the nuns can try to determine what personal boundaries or special needs the women have. Some women need to share their horrible journeys; others suppress them.

  One of the things they do best at the shelter is making sure every woman living there feels empowered enough to be part of the team to save those who have just arrived. When they know new women are coming, they meet to pray and discuss a strategy to welcome them, complete with contingency plans, including what to do if they have been severely abused or if they are thought to have an STD or are pregnant. When women just show up on their doorstep, everyone improvises.

  Since communication is vital, Sister Rita has taped small white labels to all the furniture in the shelter, each of which has an Italian description written on it in black marker. They are meant to help teach the residents basic Italian words, like culla (baby crib) and armadio (closet). It is reminiscent of a kindergarten classroom.

  There is a main kitchen for the shelter and a side kitchen where the girls can make tea or warm up baby bottles. Depending on the makeup of the group at any given time, sometimes all the girls each cook their own meals and eat when they want to as a way to avoid fights and arguments. Other times, or when there are visitors, they eat together like a big family of women and babies. Some people stay for many months; others just a few days.

  Perhaps no two groups of women could seem more opposite than elderly white Italian virgin nuns and young Nigerian black women who have been forced to sell their bodies to anonymous men for lurid sex acts. They have a strange kind of mismatched kindred spirit, and their bonds defy all logic, at least at first. But it was the English cardinal Vincent Nichols, the man Pope Francis appointed to lead an anti-trafficking initiative called the Santa Marta Group, who explained perfectly how the nuns gain the trust of the Nigerian women and vice versa.

  Sitting on an ornate red tapestried settee in the English College on the Via Giulia in Rome, a far cry from the streets of the Domitiana, he explained that the reason the two groups of women bond so easily is because, contrary to what we might think, they harbor no preconceived notions about each other. “The nun cannot envision the prostitute’s journey any more than the prostitute can envision the nun’s,” he said. “That’s why they find their common ground as women. Their trust in each other is pure because they have no reason not to trust each other.”

  There is no sense of judgment whatsoever by the nuns towards the girls. Even when they first come into the shelter, even when they are treated for STDs or when they can’t possibly pinpoint who the fathers of their babies are. Nor do they ask too many questions when the women have extra pocket money or when they suddenly disappear when they aren’t scheduled to be gone. There is no place for suspicion in the business of saving souls. The nuns are on the front line of a dangerous battle with very few allies and they can’t afford to doubt anyone’s sincerity.

  They know the women are afraid. They know they are embarrassed and humiliated by what they’ve been through. The nuns work to give them back a sense of dignity that the madams took from them.

  “You can’t imagine what they have to do,” Sister Rita once told me. “They are forced, out of fear they will be killed or beaten, to show affection towards these men. They have to satisfy them. They have to pretend they enjoy it or the client might not pay. It’s the lowest form of humiliation.”

  Sister Rita tries to counsel the women to love themselves. Those who are pregnant are sometimes easier to work with because the baby becomes a distraction. They can be encouraged to be kind to themselves “for the baby” and are told not to be depressed or it might hurt the pregnancy. Sister Rita believes that all women have an innate maternal instinct and that even under these horrific circumstances of conception a woman can love a baby she is carrying. And, perhaps more importantly, that the baby will love them back, unconditionally. “Many of these girls don’t know what to expect when they give birth, but when their baby needs them, they sometimes feel loved for the first time in their lives,” she says. “And they can’t help but love those babies back. That love saves them.”

  It’s much harder for the victims of sexual exploitation to forgive themselves. Many women who are forced into prostitution develop serious body image issues. Some become anorexic. Some self-mutilate. They see themselves as unattractive or even disfigured. Sister Rita does not have mirrors in any of the sleeping rooms at Casa Ruth. Sometimes it takes a long time before they are ready to look at themselves. Sometimes the ability never comes.

  There are many misconceptions when it comes to the worldliness of the nuns and what they understand. When I first started working on this project, I assumed that the celibate nuns would have no way to relate to what the Nigerian women had gone through because they weren’t sexually active themselves.

  But as I got to know more victims, I realized that no woman can relate to sexual slavery unless she has lived it because the choices these women must make and the acts that those who are victims are forced to perform cannot be equated to any aspect of sex as most women know it.

  In the case of the sex trafficked women, especially the young ones, the act of sex is rape. They dread it, hate it, and loathe the men who pay for it and despise their madams who force them to do it. In that sense, there is no difference between a virginal nun and a married mother of two when it comes to relating to what these women have gone through. We simply can’t.

  There are degrees of empathy, sympathy and skepticism that go with the study of this sort of tragedy. Many times when I met women who had been rescued or who had escaped their madams and yet chose to dress in sexy or tight clothing, I found myself second-guessing them. It took a long time to realize that recovery for many women includes the right to feel sexy without fear of exploitation, to feel pretty without being judged and to feel happiness without any guilt. The problems of perception almost always start with those of us on the periphery, not those at the epicenter.

  While they might not comprehend the full horror that the women have been through, the nuns truly feel that they are conduits to God for those they are helping. In their eyes, only God can help them defy the JuJu curse and forgive themselves. In a perfect world, the women would get psychiatric counseling to help deal with the trauma they’ve been through, but those sorts of services are not available in the Land of Fires, so the nuns have to fulfil multiple roles. There is simply no one else even trying to help.

  It is impossible to appreciate truly just what nuns on the front line of a crisis like this are faced with. They do daily battle with few rewards, risking their lives at the hands of one of the deadliest organized crime syndicates in the world. At Casa Ruth, the happiest days are those when babies are born or brought home from the hospital, but even those days must surely be clouded by the circumstances. There are moments of laughter and celebration, but it would be a stretch to describe a single day at Casa Ruth as one filled with a natural joy. Every day is just a different degree of tragic.

  The nuns have an easier time trusting the girls they save than the other way around. Because so many of the women forced into sexual slavery were duped by what
they thought were religious women back home, the nuns at Casa Ruth have more to prove. It is unbelievably common to hear that the first point of contact for the women who end up being trafficked to Italy was at a local mosque or church in Nigeria, when a religious-seeming woman asked them about their life. Those first conversations, all so similar no matter where the girls were from, serve as a sort of screening for the recruiters. Eventually, the faux-religious women gain their trust under the auspices of shared worship or through a common perceived desire to find a better life. Soon, the religious woman in Nigeria has an idea, a cousin or brother in Europe who needs a babysitter, a friend with a beauty salon who needs a braider. The story is almost always the same, so when the nuns first approach the women, it is understandable that the girls are skeptical.

  Sister Rita knows that obstacle all too well. “We have to give them time to see we are here to help,” she says. “They see that we are dressed as nuns, we act like nuns, and I think that helps. We also have a reputation among the women on the Domitiana. We are known as a place to help, if only they can get to us.”

  The sisters run the shelter on a tight schedule, even though they are often disrupted by new arrivals and basic problems inherent in southern Italy. Mornings are spent shuttling the women and girls to activities. Some of the women work as cleaners in nearby office buildings or private houses, some are studying for their high school exams in Italian. Someone almost inevitably has a doctor’s appointment for an STD that just won’t go away or a prenatal or postnatal check-up.

  Sister Rita drives the girls to their appointments and even holds their hands as the doctors examine them. That way, she says, she can ensure the girls will be treated with the respect that is often spared on migrants, especially Africans.

  “They don’t like to be touched,” Sister Rita told me once after taking a young woman to a doctor visit. “Some of them have serious post-traumatic stress disorder from all the rapes and beatings and sex.”

  The babies at Casa Ruth are the saviors and the elderly sisters are natural grandmothers to them. Before the era of Pope Francis, children born out of wedlock were never actually denied the rite of baptism, but it was done discreetly. The Church didn’t want to punish the child, but it also did not want to be seen to approve of the way it was conceived. Now, under Pope Francis, babies are more likely to be baptized in celebration, whether they are born of prostitutes, same-sex couples or the traditionally married whom the Church prefers. Sister Rita had been celebrating baptisms in the local church long before Francis normalized them. By recognizing the babies like that, she hopes that the young mothers will accept them, too.

  “It’s not their fault,” she says. “These babies need all the support they can get. There are few babies in the world born of such unloving circumstances.”

  Once, when I was at Casa Ruth for lunch, Sister Rita and I waited in the dining room with a few of the children whose mothers were not yet back from their morning activities. While we waited, she picked up eleven-month-old Emanuel, whose mother was at an Italian lesson. She figures he is the sixtieth baby that has come through the shelter in the last few years, though it is hardly cause for commemoration.

  Emanuel’s skin is much lighter than his mother’s and Sister Rita explains that the fathers of these babies are surely Italian because they are the only clients who pay double not to have to use a condom. But that’s as much as anyone will ever know about Emanuel’s father, or the rest of the babies she has helped bring into the world.

  Emanuel squeals with laughter and starts pounding on Sister Rita’s chest, wrapping his tiny fingers around the wooden cross that hangs around her neck. Soon Emanuel jumps down and scampers across the floor – he has been walking since he was just nine months old, she tells me proudly. Sister Rita then shows me the walls of the dining room, which are plastered with snapshots of all the babies she and the sisters have saved. Each photo has been lovingly cut into hearts and diamonds and glued onto colored paper.

  There are scant photos of their mothers, who find it hard to smile, she says. When I ask her more about what will happen to the babies, she tells me that they are the most unwanted children she has ever known. They are the product of sex trafficking, or rape, and though not begotten of love, she reminds me, her thin finger in the air, they deserve to be treated as if they were.

  Emanuel’s mother Beauty soon returns from her Italian lesson and takes Emanuel to change his diaper. She was forced into sex slavery through the all-too-common initiation rite of a violent gang rape more than three years before her son was born. Her thick hair has been braided into dozens, maybe even hundreds, of narrow cornrows, clearly done by one of the other women in the house who likely thought that she was coming to Italy to work as a braider in a salon. Some of the braids are laced with orange ribbons; others are attached to lighter colored extensions. The perfect braids are tied into a ponytail that is perched high on the left side of Beauty’s head, giving her a touch of innocence and whimsy. She is quick to smile, one of the few women who actually looks happy. In fact, she looks like any college-aged student you might see almost anywhere else in the world.

  Later on, the women and babies and nuns gather in the dining room. A large steaming dish of African rice and spicy tomato sauce has been prepared by one of the women who left the shelter several years ago, but who now works for the nuns as their cook and cleaner.

  “This is Honey. She is a real success story,” Sister Rita tells me as she cups the young woman’s face in her hands. “She is married now and has four beautiful children.”

  Honey looks at Sister Rita and smiles warmly.

  “Mamma saved me,” she tells me. All the women and girls at Casa Ruth call Sister Rita “mamma,” which is a term of respect Nigerians often use for women who are older them.

  We all stand as Sister Rita begins the lunchtime prayer of thanks, followed by a quick sign of the cross and then the scraping of the wooden chairs across the tile floors as everyone tucks into the meal. The sisters pour themselves small glasses of tart red wine from a dark bottle emblazoned with the Ursuline crest.

  None of the young women drink. Emanuel eats a few bites of rice as he sits on his mother’s lap and then makes his way around the table while she eats. He is a happy child, so blissfully unaware of the misery that brought him into being.

  Later, I ask Sister Rita if the children will ever know about their mothers’ lives. “That’s up to them,” she tells me. “Hopefully not. You know, a little white lie never hurts.”

  Then she smiles in a way that makes you wonder whether she is serious or not, a trait as endearing as it is unnerving. Her keen wit, both ironic and astute, must be how Sister Rita squares all she has to do to save these women and still keep her faith.

  She describes one of the first women she helped off the street, whose daughter later found out she was forced into sex work. “This woman’s daughter went to her one day and asked why she had stayed at Casa Ruth, because that’s a place for whores,” Sister Rita says, shaking her head in sadness. The woman’s daughter never accepted it, and the two became estranged. “These women pay for the crimes of others their whole life.”

  And not everyone fits in. In 2016, they opened their doors to a Ukrainian woman who was part of a growing network of non-Nigerian women who are trying to cash in on the local Domitiana sex market. At first, Sister Rita thought she was “pure of heart,” which is generally all it takes to qualify to stay. But soon the nuns realized the woman had fallen in love with one of her clients and was hoping to break up his marriage. Apparently, she would meet him at a hotel nearby. Casa Ruth provided the perfect cover for their illicit relationship and paid the woman’s expenses so she wouldn’t have to prostitute herself to other men. Eventually the sisters kicked her out. “She didn’t want to follow our path to serenity,” Sister Assunta explained. “We have no place for those who won’t walk with us here.”

  At the end of each day, the women who live at Casa Ruth put their babies to bed and
Sister Rita makes a final walk around the shelter, picking up stray toys and straightening the pictures on the walls. Sometimes she sits in the dark kitchen wondering and worrying about what is going to happen when she and the other sisters are too old to do this work. She feels twenty years younger than she is, she says, but there may be a time when the babies and tragedy become too much for her.

  “I hope a younger sister will come join us to learn about what we do,” she tells me before she heads off to bed. “I worry that the shelter won’t continue if we leave.”

  Nights are short at Casa Ruth, filled with noise. Babies cry, and sometimes so do the women. Whispers turn to giggles or arguments. Other times someone sings or hums African lullabies as they walk their babies up and down the hallways. In the morning, Sister Rita is the first to rise and the smell of the first drops of espresso coffee from the worn-out Moka pot is like an olfactory alarm clock. The shelter slowly wakes up to face another day that will have laughter and tears. It is most terrifying to think about what would happen if it weren’t here.

  A man with a live chicken, used in black magic rituals, cycles along the Domitiana on his way to a witch doctor who will place a JuJu curse on a trafficked woman to tie her to her madam.

  3

  Madams and the Black Magic JuJu Curse

  “The curse cannot be broken. Not even prayer can get rid of the JuJu.” – Rose, sex trafficking victim

  NAPLES – The first time I met Rose was in the dining room at Casa Ruth. She is a petite woman who wears her hair in an intricately styled Afro that she constantly adjusts and pushes into place as she speaks. She has a thick raised scar that cuts a white diagonal line across her dark forehead down through her left eyebrow. It is from a bottle that her madam broke over her head at a connection house in Castel Volturno.