Lime, lies and HIV/AIDS
By EMMANUEL MAYAH
Saturday, December 23, 2006

•Girls of Easy Bar Photo: Sun News Publishing

Mores Stories on This Section

The death of a young woman highlights the dangerous route of self-medication in Nigeria. EMMANUEL MAYAH visits Ijora Badia and tells the ghastly story of sex workers battling the HIV scourge with lime and an uncanny cocktail of bleach and soda.

Nothing in the trim handwriting of the visitor suggested anything close to unhappiness, despair or confusion.
Five minutes earlier, the visitor’s note had arrived the newsroom but hard as the reporter tried, the name remained unfamiliar. So also was the face of the young woman sitting at the far end of the reception. She did not speak but merely rose respectfully from her seat, her tiny black bag clinging tightly to her.

“Are you Miss Esse Idehin?”
She nodded. The reporter had never met her before. As she struggled for something to say, it was clear she was not one of the readers whose rejoinders had crammed the e-mail box.

The handshake was awkward, her eyes taking a suspicious sweep across the room. Not many visitors were in the reception, yet she faintly requested that she spoke with the reporter outside.
Over the din of the giant generator and commercial motorbikes belching smoke into the hamathan haze, she managed to say: “Please I want you to see this.”

From her handbag she pulled out a crumpled newspaper publication. It was actually a page out of a newsletter published by a Pentecostal church in Lagos. The story was a good story, about a 26-year-old woman who had received miracle cure for AIDS. The woman in the photograph wore a happy smile. Her name was given as Christina Okpe. The story was a testimony of the same Christina detailing how she had lived with full-blown AIDS and how a bus preacher directed her to a healing camp where she received miracle.

Christina went on to say in the article that she had forsaken her sinful past and now lived under a glorious authority as a child of God protected from earthly afflictions. The faith healer was quoted as saying that Christina’s case was yet another proof that “for all those who believe in Him, they shall be healed of every sickness including blood diseases…”

Getting a little impatient, the reporter looked up with a frown. Testimonies of faith healings were common in religious bulletins and newsletters. Until the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) put a stop to it, television screens were riddled with episode after episode of religious miracles. Many of the miracle receivers were believed to be phonies recruited to advertise the purported powers of the spiritual leader. It was possible Christina was just another but Esse cut short the puzzle by saying that the woman in the picture was dead. According to her, Christina died about four months after the testimony, of complications arising from AIDS.

Her mission to the newspaper house began to get clear when Esse disclosed that the late Christina was her friend. Until she moved to the healing camp and later to her village where she died, both women had lived in the same house. What Esse didn’t however disclose on her first visit was that Christina was a sex worker. She only said she would be happy if the reporter found time to investigate the activities of the healing camp.

If Esse was disturbed that Christina was brainwashed into seeking refuge in a spiritual camp rather than in a hospital, it appeared her motivation was less out of anger than of fear. Four days later when she telephoned to talk again about her late friend, she had ended by passionately begging the reporter to find out if lime could kill the HIV virus. The way she sought for the information, it would appear her own life depended on it.

Gradually, what appeared to be the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle began to fit. Earlier in the year, February 2006, the reporter had done a story on child prostitution in one of the seediest parts of Lagos, Ijora Badia. The information would soon come that the death of Christina was leading to an inquisition in Ijora Badia where she lived close to three years until her death. Virtually all the girls, including Esse, in the same ‘lodging’ she occupied were being hounded. From the very first contact with Ijora Badia in February, that was hardly surprising.

The mere rumour that a girl in a‘lodging’ was down with the “deadly disease” attracted consequences from the brothel owner, the manager and or the unruly patrons. Arson attack was a well-know aspect of the community’s reflex.

While piecing together the details of Christina’s last days before she left for the healing camp, Saturday Sun gathered that her death had jarred this small slum into reality. And grudgingly so. For years, many in this community had lived with the belief that they had built a wall impregnable by the HIV virus. For the men, part of that wall was built with superstitions, myths and talisman from respected witchdoctors; while the women fortified themselves with home-made brews, lime therapy and a ghastly cocktail of soda, bleach and tetracycline capsules.

3 Houses, one brothel
If Christina’s death had snapped Ijora Badia out of its fantasies, not many people were seen mourning. When Saturday Sun visited the community in search of Esse, it was clear, from as far as the railway crossing, that nothing much had changed since the first visit in February. Access to the notorious slum was still from Orile bus stop, through the squalour of Amukoko to Badia Police Station.

Again, the visitor was assaulted by filths, heaps of refuse, shanties, overcrowding, dead rats on front doors, smelly waters on passageways and canals either clogged with silts or overtaken by weeds. Built on marshy land, a greater number of homes were hovels erected on stilts. This meant that to move from house to house or street to street, the individual had to walk on winding and narrow stretches of gangplanks.

If you met someone on the way, one of you would have to give way for the other. One little mistake and the individual might have to contend with the murky water below, which in fact was as bad as a cesspit. The homes had no toilets, a standard that had constrained residents to burrow holes in a corner of their rooms over which they squat to answer the call of nature. Everything would go under, into the water, after which the hole is concealed with a cartoon or old carpet. For homes without ‘holes’ the occupants defecated into polythene bags and afterwards did what was called “short put”, again into the waters.

It was a life fit only for animals but that was the lot of the community called Ijora Badia.
Everywhere the reporter looked, it was one thin line between life and death, yet you found children balancing delicately on these gangplanks, sometimes prancing about and chasing one another as kids were wont, in what for them was the only playground. Shocking as it was, some of these stilt houses were sex parlours occupied by aging spinsters and single mothers.

Indeed, it was the last census that truly exposed the underbelly of the Ijora Badia. Officials of the National Population Commission were startled to discover that they could not count more than three houses without coming across a brothel. But then Ijora Badia had a history of desperation. Majority of the residents were said to be former evictees from Makoko and Maroko whose homes were demolished in the early 1990s by the then military governor of Lagos State, Colonel Raji Rasaki. As talks of resettlement became a dingdong, they could only watch from a distance as the rubbles gave way for eye-catching homes for the city’s millionaires.

Dislocated and desperate and unwilling to give up, the evictees whose shops and small businesses had also gone with their homes, resorted to self-help. Many of the women had taken to selling their bodies while the men went for ancillary services like running porn cinema shops, brewing local gin and concocting all manners of aphrodisiacs.

Startling as it was, every shop or space had something to support the sex industry. Along the one-kilometer stretch of rusty railway track, funnily considered to be the community’s showpiece, vendors of all manners of boiled tubers, spiced meats, marijuana, tea, and locally brewed liquor called Kparaga were stationed.

In groups, men of different ages hovered around, gulping the different mix of local brews, each credited with a potency to cure every ailment under the sun, from rheumatism to malaria. But more than anything, Kparaga was touted as an aphrodisiac capable of correcting erectile dysfunction as well as boosting a man’s staying power. The same reason was given for the patronage of dog meat pepper soup, a curious line of business that commanded six sales outlets.

Room II
About 50 yards, along the rusty track, from a canine bar called ‘Frenchies’, was a brothel named ‘Brothers Inn.’ This was where Christina had lived.

A little before noon on a Wednesday, activities were lull in the drinking parlour. The music box was blaring all the same, to the pleasure of a few of the ladies who seemed to enjoy shouting at their male companions. From an adjoining door, an open courtyard could be seen, shaped by rooms arranged along three sides of a rectangle.
It took almost two hours of sitting and hopelessly studying the graffiti before Esse emerged from one of the back rooms. She looked startled, then embarrassed; yet managed to express gratitude for the reporter’s visit.

Inside her room and away from the noise, the reporter apologized for butting in but explained he had only come to check if she was still being harassed. She shook her head. The situation was now better, she said. The brothel owners were doing a good damage control. Prices of beer had been slashed, a ghetto reggae musician now entertained the patrons and the manager had shopped for four young and beautiful girls, one of whom now occupied Room 11, Christina’s former room for free. Esse sadly murmured that if she had any real problem, it was herself. Her eyes glistened with tears.

Asked if she was surprised when her friend came down with HIV/AIDS, she starred emptily into space. “I knew she was sick, but I did not know the cause of her sickness. Let me tell you, until I saw the church newspaper, I never knew my friend’s name was Christina. Her name here was Chocho and that was what we called her.”

Like Christina’s Chocho, every prostitute in Lagos was known by an alias. Esse said it was the least they could do in a world of lies. She also revealed that in most cases, relationship between one prostitute and another was characterized by suspicion, distrust and malicious joy. “Chocho was a good person, so I don’t feel betrayed that she never told me her real name. Here, nobody knows my real name. It is the way we are. A wise prostitute never discuses her problems with another prostitute. The mere suspicion of HIV, they’ll throw you out. The manager’s job is to keep the place ‘clean’. Customers run away from any hotel if they think that any of the girls has AIDS.”

Ironically, in Ijora Badia, the level of consciousness of HIV/AIDS was found to be rather high. Since 1986 when the Military Hospital in Yaba, Lagos, reported the first case of Human Immune Deficiency Virus in the country, found in the blood sample of a 16-year-old girl, almost everyone had become aware of the pandemic. However, what had become worrisome were the unorthodox and often uncanny measures employed in fighting it.

Saturday Sun, discovered that among the male population of this community, it is common to possess a talisman called Iba-esu, said to protect the man from HIV/AIDS. The efficacy is only based on the belief that if the man’s sex partner were HIV positive, he would receive an ‘electric shock’ the moment he touches any part of her body.
Interestingly, the womenfolk have their own talisman, Iyo-esu, woven into fashionable waistbands. If the woman’s sex partner has HIV/AIDS or STDs like gonorrhea or syphilis, the Iyo-esu is believed to work by making the penis go limp.

Real or myth, the Iyo-esu is known to have caused serious problems for women who use them. Men with erectile dysfunction are known to have taken their frustrations out on the woman and if she is a prostitute, she is accused of using a corrupt Iyo-esu that allows her to accept money from clients but never gets to render any service.
Esse narrated that she and her colleagues tended to get the most problem from men who use Iba-esu.” They are the ones who will never use the condom, no matter what you tell them.” It was further gathered that in the stiff competition for male patrons, young girls are naturally more attractive. Dedicated to a footloose and fancy-free life, they care about nothing and allow men to sleep with them without condoms, especially when they are offered extra money.

Indeed, the preference for young girls is such that down the railway line is a popular and almost exclusive brothel named Easy Bar. As branding ploy, Easy Bar accommodates only young ladies who are not more than 18 years. Not once, the police have helped families trace 15-year-old runaways to this place.
Esse explained ruefully that older ladies were more conscious of the threat of HIV/AIDS, but because they had less patronage, they were rarely in a position to put their foot down when the man refused to use condom.

Explaining the dilemma, she said: “We all pay the same amount of money to stay here. You pay for the small room you occupy every morning. We contribute the money the manager gives to the police; we pay NEPA (National Electricity Power Authority) bill; we pay generator levy, we pay OPC (Vigilance group) money and we pay the cleaners. Yet, it is possible in a day, you do not get one customer. I don’t want to say this; but the truth is that thereare some parents in this neighbourhood who cannot afford to give common 20 Naira to their children to feed in school. So some of our customers are getting cheaper bargain from school girls.”

The lime option
In the face of the odds against women of Ijora Badia, Esse said the only defense they knew against HIV/AIDS was lime therapy. Indeed, the widespread use of lime or lemon juice amongst women is such that at the popular Oyingbo Market in Lagos, lime, pounded in mortar, sieved and bottled— is one of the most sought-after items. At 200 Naira for a big Lucozade bottle, virtually all the buyers are women.
According to Mrs. Oluremi Afeniforo, consultant gynecologist, General Hospital Isolo, the use of lime or lemon juice is a century long practice for vaginal hygiene and contraception.

Speaking to Saturday Sun on the popularity of its use among Nigerian women, Afeniforo said: “Lime or lemon is natural microbicide used even by our grandmothers as a douching agent. It is employed for the personal hygiene of the woman because it is a good defense against any infections in the woman’s reproductive organ. Lime is acidic and many infectious agents, including the HIV virus, cannot survive in an acidic environment.

The practice has taken deep roots in our society, especially among poor or rural women who use it as a cheap form of contraceptive or microbicide.”
Confirming that every woman in Brothers Inn was equipped with at least a bottle of lime juice, Esse said that the women rinsed with the juice before or after sex to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV.

Disclosing what were likely not to be found missing in the medicine cabinet of the poor prostitutes of Ijora Badia, Esse counted lime, potash and alum. “Yes, all of us use lime or lemon, but lime is more available. We use it for menstrual pain and for any disease from men like gonorrhea, AIDS virus and others. Some of the girls here grind potash, add it to lime juice and drink it to terminate unwanted pregnancy.”

Corroborating Esse’s last claim, Dr. Afeniforo confirmed that it was for the same reason most ladies drink Schweppes (a carbonated lemon drink). “It is a reflection of the belief that lemon can stop you from getting pregnant or help you to flush out one. And for the alum, women have used it to ensure a tighter vaginal wall to increase sexual pleasure for both the man and the woman. Look at what alum does when employed to clean snails, it tightens the muscle.”

Lime and lies
If the poor sex workers in Ijora Badia had won many battles against sexually transmitted diseases using lime, the story appeared not to be the same with HIV. Investigations carried out at Esse’s behest produced a coldly negative result that was at once contradictory as it was ambivalent.
Sitting behind her polished desk, Dr. Afeniforo looked more of a stern judge than a gynecologist as she passed what would be a shocking verdict on lime juice.

“On the efficacy of the use of lime juice in combating HIV, I will start by saying yes and no. Yes, lime can kill the dreaded virus in just two minutes. Don’t forget, I said earlier that lime is acidic. Acid kills pathogens, including HIV. In fact, laboratory studies have shown that a 1 to 5 dilution of lime or lemon juice killed 90 percent of HIV in just two minutes.

You would say, wonderful! What are we waiting for? Let us encourage our sisters in Ijora Badia and elsewhere to use more of it. It is the greatest weapon the woman has ever possessed. Good news for men too. Lime is good for post-coital penile hygiene. Wiping the penis immediately after intercourse with lime or lemon juice or vinegar should kill the virus before it has a chance to infect. Sadly for the woman, the way the lime works in the laboratory is not the same way it does in the human body because of other factors.”

Drawing the reporter’s attention to studies published in The Economist, Dr. Afeniforo pointed out while one-in-five dilution of lime is effective in killing HIV, dilutions that are less proved too weak to inactivate HIV efficiently. So while one-in-five dilution is a success, in the bedroom there is a problem because seminal fluid is involved in the mix. Seminal fluid is alkaline, and this presence of semen will reduce the acidity of lime juice therefore making it less effective unless very high concentrations are used. The bad news is that a high concentration of lime would damage the cells that line the vagina. According to the study, such damage would make it easier, rather than harder, for HIV to get into the bloodstream.

Esse had a hint of worry as the reporter took time to repeat what Dr. Afeniforo had said. She stared at a large poster of Mary J. Blige pinned to the wall of her room. The silence that followed was deafening: ‘If lime couldn’t protect Christina, could the same fate had befallen her?’
Just like many women in the neighbourhood, Esse had never gone for a test. In Nigeria, there are 6.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS, according to the Federal Ministry of Health. That figure is thought to be conservative, given that the majority does not know their status.

Saturday Sun located Mrs. Ayinke, founder of Ijora Vanguard, a HIV/AIDS advocacy group. Two years ago, Ayinke had tested positive. Her estranged husband had suddenly reappeared, spent some months with her and the kids, and ended up infecting her with the virus only to disappear again. The baby that came afterwards was positive and had died in August this year.

The Ijora Vanguard had been doing some work in the community. Told of the reporter’s findings on lime, Ayinke expressed grave fears. She blamed women’s reluctance to go for test on stigmatization and illustrated same with the pathetic story of Abigail, a young housewife who was banished by her church and thrown out of her marriage on account of testing positive. Abigail’s status was established in the labour room while having her first baby. Forced to return to her father’s house, her brothers severally pulled down the door of her room in their determination to eject her. It was only a matter of time before she lost her baby.

Ayinke revealed that in her work in Ijora Badia, she had discovered that women were more vulnerable to infections than she had imagined. If the news that at least some men in the community were using condom sounded cheerful, Ayinke pointed out that the most popular and cheapest brand, Gold Circle, had been banned in Ghana for its defect, saying that even if the said condoms are different from the ones made in Nigeria, this development was still not a source of worry to regulatory bodies in Nigeria.

Given the mounting odds against the women of Ijora Badia, the Vanguard coordinator predicted that the culture of silence would precipitate the kind of horror witnessed in Uganda some years back. “You can see that most of our women are living in self-doubt. Those who are positive do not have the right information on what to do or where to go. Those who are not sure of their status still travel the dangerous route of self-medication or at best deal with quacks in their effort to protect or cure themselves.”

With a shudder, the reporter recalled what Esse had once said; that she suspected that one of the ‘lodgers’ was addicted to bleach. It sounded crazy but she had sworn that she once saw the next-room occupant taking a tot of bleach while doing her laundry in the courtyard. Another time, the same lady was allegedly seen blending soda and tetracycline capsules and gulping the mixture, all of which had left a permanent whiteness to her lips.
Days later, the reporter had cause to return to Brothers Inn to see Esse. She tried to reason everything through, and then complained that she was drowning. She said she had been thinking of moving on. To where? She did not know.

In a very sober voice, Esse confessed that she had ended up at Brothers Inn after several failed attempts to travel to Europe. Once, she posed as an Oba’s wife just to get visa. For seven months she lived and was abused by the traditional ruler who, working closely with a syndicate, had promised to place her in his entourage, as one of his wives, on his next trip abroad.

It was the reporter’s turn to maintain a deafening silence. As the afternoon smudged into evening, weariness descended heavily on the journey back home. Esse’s helplessness had become infectious, yet it made it easier to understand how Christina had fallen prey to the manipulations of a spiritual healer. In the fashion of the spiritualists, she must have been told to speak by faith and declare that she was healed, only to be forced to go without food for days as a way of claiming her healing. The image of her troubled face floated about for days in the mind and remained so until the middle of the month when the telephone rang one morning. It was Ayinke. She announced that a lady called Esse was in her office.