By Mike Frick
Lanlan is the founder and executive director of Tianjin’s Xin’ai Home, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting the health and rights of female sex workers in Tianjin. Over the course of four hours, Lan Lan showed us two different outreach environments: a bathhouse with about twenty-five sex workers and a street with dozens of hair salons and massage parlors, each staffed by two or three women.
The bathhouse was a dormitory with several large rooms, including a kitchen, showers, an outdoor patio, and dorm rooms which contained side-by-side beds with lockers for women to store clothes and other personal belongings. Here, Lanlan passed out condoms and lubricant and encouraged everyone to attend Xin’ai Home’s next event, a monthly forum that brings together sex workers to talk about different topics related to women’s health. Lanlan said that most women working in this bathhouse are from northern China, with a few from Sichuan and Anhui provinces.
After leaving the bathhouse, we traveled to an area of town located next to a garbage dump. Low-slung brick buildings housing massage parlors and hair salons lined a narrow, pock-marked street. Many of the buildings sat empty, their sides spray-painted with the character “拆” marking them for demolition. Lanlan’s outreach assistant explained that the women who work in these smaller salons usually earn 20 RMB for masturbation and 30-50 RMB for other services, of which bosses will usually take 10-20 RMB as a management fee. Many of the women working on this street came from Gansu province and moved to Tianjin intending to work as maids. Lanlan walked up and the down the street and poked her head into different buildings, greeting many women by name and collecting contact information for those she had not previously met.
After accompanying Lanlan on outreach, several experiences left a lasting impression:
- First, the physicality of the work. Outreach involves a lot of walking,
and while an afternoon was a novel and enjoyable experience for Gisa and me,
conducting outreach is physically-demanding and time-consuming work. Lanlan
hopes to include more areas of Tianjin in Xin’ai Home’s outreach program, but lacks
the staffing and resources to expand the number of outreach locations.
- Second, the cultural competency required to build trust and rapport with the sex workers. Throughout the afternoon, Lanlan interacted with a diverse array of women representing different ages, hometowns, education levels, and familiarity with HIV/AIDS and gynecological health. Lanlan lamented the challenges of reaching the growing number of women from Gansu, since neither she nor her staff can speak their local dialect. Literacy presents another obstacle, since many of the women from Gansu come from small villages and have not completed schooling beyond primary school. Finally, Lanlan emphasized that building rapport with sex workers requires treating them as
professionals. Before entering a storefront, Lanlan always called out: “Any
customers present? I don’t want to interrupt your business!” Lanlan explained
that respecting and protecting their business opportunities is essential for gaining
their trust.
- Third, the importance of conflict management to protect the safety of
outreach workers and clients. Gisa and I witnessed a tense exchange when a drunken
man wandered into a small massage parlor while we were chatting with a sex
worker. He began to encroach upon the woman’s personal space and reached out to
hit her. Lanlan defused the situation by intervening in a direct yet
non-threatening manner: she pointed out that among four women, the man was “in
a minority” in the room and needed to watch his behavior and be more respectful.
In another hair salon, I noticed a television that displayed closed-circuit
video feed from a camera monitoring the mouth of the street. The women present
explained they used it to anticipate trouble such as police raids, which had
recently led many storefronts on the street to close. Lanlan and her assistant
displayed a keen familiarity with the neighborhood, its history and potential
points of trouble.
Outreach is an important form of communication and interaction between NGOs and the
community they serve. It ensures that information about programs, events, and available resources is passed on to the community. At the same time, feedback and information from the community keep NGO staff attuned and connected to community needs and changes in the environment. Our short stint into this sphere of grassroots NGO work demonstrated the important role local initiatives like outreach play in the larger work of our Chinese partners.
