Aliya Rakhmetova, SWAN Coordinator: I met Vantala (her nickname) at the International AIDS Conference. She came there with the drug users' community from Ukraine and was mostly participating in discussions around harm reduction and drug use in the region. She is a human rights activists, who supports rights of drug users and sex workers. So I thought it might make sense to look into the reality in which sex workers who use drugs live in Ukraine. The interview was held in Russian and I took short notes, so I hope I didn't miss anything.

AR: Tell me about yourself.
V: When there was nothing to sell or steal from home to support my drug habit, I had to think about other ways to find money. By the looks men gave me it was obvious that I was attractive. So I started to provide sexual services… It wasn't difficult. I knew about sex from movies. After getting paid I would go to the other end of the city to my dealer to buy drugs. The next evening everything started again.
Surprisingly, in 3 years of my sex work experience I never was harassed by the police. Maybe my expensive outfit looked more like a young girl going to a party?

Interview with Žaneta, 47 years-old Bratislava

How long have you been working in the sex industry?
Z: Four years.

How did you start?
Z: I was involved with guys, the classic relationship, but everyone wanted me only after I had sex with them. And because every woman also has her needs, a few time, I have. But when it’s the next day and they didn’t call or anything. I felt stupid, a low sense of self. For two years I had a lover, only for sex. It was not out in the open. There was no courtship, no invitations on trips, to the lake, or to the cinema. It was simply about sex but I still had to love him. It was always just the night, and then I had to head back home to my house in Bratislava.

In September issue read about:

-10 things which you need to do this month. One of them is: Be a fighter- fight for your rights, fight for your success, fight for the things which make you happy, fight for the happiness of your loved ones)
- prostitution in the temples
- Women's baths and houses during the Old Roman Empire
- Terminology (bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, inter-sexual, homophobia ext.)
- Sex therapy
- Happy birthday Virgo!

Use online translation to understand Macedonian STAR newsletter  :)

In this issue read:
*STAR opens its new office to involve more sex workers
*Find out the meaning of the terms sex worker and sex work
*Confession of a sex worker (an interview with a Serbian sex worker who works in Vienna.
Read in Macedonian

Issue 1 of 2011 features:
*  an interview with an HIV positive person, who tells the readers about his life and illness, warning sex workers to always use a condom and to pay attention to their health, no matter what requests they get.
* an article about the current grant from Mama Cash won by SZEXE.
* a short report from SZEXE legal aid provider on the new legislation on misdemeanors and its effects.
* history of Easter
* professional tips for sex workers
* a reports on a garbage collection campaigns, with photos. The campaign aimed at clearing the territories where street sex workers are active, in order to make local residents more tolerant towards sex workers and to make sex workers more aware of their environment and the damages they may cause to it through littering, throwing away plastic bottles, condoms and other garbage.
* a call for participation in its newly launched project under TAMOP program, with support from the European Social Fund and the Hungarian governement, aiming for holding health prevention events for sex workers.

Read in Hungarian here.

An article by a Hungarian sex worker
Before I tell you about my experience in Vienna, I would first like to congratulate everybody who put so much effort into organising the Journalist session and the Sex Workers Pre-Conference meeting. It was a joy, a pleasure and an honour to partake in these meetings as a Sex Worker and if I was asked to partake again, I would gladly do it.

Translated from INTOXI, Slovak magazine for sex workers and drug users
Not long time ago I received an invitation from Eva from Odyseus, to attend a meeting of sex workers, which was to be held in Vienna. It was a pre-meeting of huge one-week long AIDS conference, about which you read in the previous issue of Intoxi. There was also an invitation for all of us, sex workers to attend the meeting together with our outreach workers. The greater was my disappointment, when in the morning, at the train station, I in vain waited for some of my colleagues, which, together with me and Katarina, the director of Odyseus, were supposed to represent Slovakia.

Shahnaz Islamova of Tais Plus shares how sex workers are trying to stay safe in the midst of a revolution in Kyrgyzstan that has turned violent.

Empower Foundation, Thailand
May 31st 2010
Political theory seems a long way away from our daily lives as working women supporting our families. We respect human rights and support equality in society. We do not agree with violence. In April 2010, protestors and soldiers came into our streets, our community and our workplaces.

What is the situation for girls from Uzbekistan or other countries in Kazakhstan ?
Recently, the migrant girls have the most problems. Let’s say their documents are OK. But the police take them to the police station and say they have to check their documents and then take the documents and lock the girls up. In a recent case in July in Taldykorgan, the police held the girls for six days, while they “checked” their documents. For six days, the girls were raped, beaten. They gave them nothing to eat. They were treated horribly while they were imprisoned. At the very end, they give their documents back and said “Your documents are fine, you can go.”