Jane Watiri, a former sex worker turned preacher has shared her story during the days she worked as a prostitute. According to Watiri, she was earning close to Sh20,000 a night. Watiri said while working as a prostitute she was a “destroyer,” driven by vengeance against men.“I was not the average prostitute,” she says, adding, “I was quite dangerous. I used to steal from my clients. I would carry everything; clothes, shoes, phones, keys and even wedding rings which I sold for Sh3,000 in Eastleigh. I used to really mess up those men,” she says. 
Watiri, 38, shared her childhood story as well revealing that she is the third born in a family of six children. She was properly taken cared of by her parents until her life took a wrong turn when she started hanging out with bad company.“I had some friends who would take me out to clubs and reggae nights when I was 14,” she recalls. Watiri said she began to live a wayward life until she was arrested at the age of 16 charged with loitering and jailed at Lang’ata Women’s Prison for a month. Upon getting out, she met a young man, fell in love, got pregnant and got married. “One day, he left me for an older woman and there I was, 17 years old, with a baby boy, no education and no job. I was very angry,” she says. “I wanted to hurt men the way the father of my child did to me. Bitterness and unforgiveness can really destroy your life.” Watiri said she changed her look every week so she would not be recognised by clients she stole from. While majority of clients would pay for sex, others just wanted to be in the company of a woman and have someone to pour out their hearts to. Others demanded unusual activities and would threaten with guns and other weapons if the sex-workers did not comply. Many of her colleagues died on the job. Some would be killed in hotel rooms and others would get into clients’ vehicles and vanish or be found dead in a ditch. “I read many eulogies of my friends and attended so burials,” she says. In 2004 she got the first taste of God when a man told her of God’s love, but she was too drunk to understand. “In my whole life, I never experienced love and care. The idea of love was very strange. He bought me many bottles of beer and left. Afterwards, I started thinking of changing,” she says. She left the streets not long after, walked into a church one day and asked the pastor to pray for her. Watiri said she met her second husband, George Mwangi, with whom she had a daughter after that time. Mwangi, was a gangster and was killed after 5 years of marriage. She says she settled with the gangster because he loved and accepted her as she was, and she hoped that she would change him. Her very public life seems to have rubbed her family the wrong way, with many questioning why she is not ashamed of speaking of her dark past. “My family has an issue with me speaking to the media because it causes them embarrassment. But I tell my story because I know there are people out there who need to hear my story and know that it is possible to change.” It is not easy dealing with sex workers, she says, because many of whom have lost hope. In spite of her sordid past, Watiri remains optimistic that her dream of getting married to a good man will come to pass. For now, she walks from door to door, saving souls. One sex worker at a time. Her seven years on the street, she says, were painful, dark and dangerous. She had a strong hatred for men, and led an utterly bitter and frustrated life, taking out her bitterness on her unsuspecting clients, many of whom she drugged and stole from. Many times she would also drug her baby to make him sleep throughout the night or just leave him to cry himself to sleep. She would carry two rolls of marijuana, one soaked in petroleum which would knock out the client, and the other one for her, to put her in the mood for work. “In our days we did not have what people today call mchele . That was the surest way of drugging your client,” she says. Source: nation.co.ke
