This is my amazing new friend Samanta, who is one of the key organizers with an amazing sex worker organization in Guatemala that's called Mujeres en Superacion - they do rights organizing and leadership development as well as HIV prevention. Samanta is an incredible activist and we stayed up late last night drinking an entire bottle of rum, talking about sex work experiences, activism, children, and more. She is a mother of two, married, and a very public sex worker activist. One beautiful story she told is how she doesn't work for a pimp, in part because she works on a street where there are trans sex workers and all the sex workers there are human rights activists so they don't shit from anyone!Wow, what an amazing couple of days it has been here, at the pre-conference event with all these incredible women and men, including trans people. It has been a little frustrating at times with too much talking in circles, but mostly amazing to see activists from other countries who i've met in the past, and to meet new ones from all over Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe. Today we are having a march for sex worker rights and we all have these amazing shirts:
Then the conference (International AIDS Conference) begins soon and we get to cause troub le, learn from each other more, and try to make the foolish governments and international institutions listen to us and stop criminalizing sex work, stop arresting us in the name of saving us from traffickers, and support sex worker rights as an integral part of HIV prevention and the fight against AIDS.I leave you with one last photo of new beautiful friends - Dino, Mariam and Princess, from Jamaica and Guyana.
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