Kenyan bar maids club together

By Anne Mawathe
BBC News, Nairobi

At the end of tiring day, a bar hostess - or bar maid as she is known in Kenya - will smile at you and serve you a cold or warm drink at your request.

Bar hostesses are often approached by customers for sex

She will be by your table at the snap of a finger even when no one bothers to even find out her name.

Yet with all the service and kindness she offers, her clients sometimes violate and abuse her.

To counter such violations and also to learn about HIV/Aids, hundreds of bar maids have gathered in Kenya's capital, Nairobi.

At the venue, popular musician Charles Nyangweno played his traditional Nyatiti guitar and hummed a song to them, sounding his alarm that Aids is real and kills.

Sexual advances

According to the National Aids Control Council, bar maids are classified alongside prostitutes and homosexuals as a high risk group.

If you resist or you abuse the customer, the manager will definitely sack you Bar hostess

Often they have to battle with sexual advances from their customers or their bosses.

"If you resist or if you abuse the customer, the manager will definitely sack you," one bar hostess said.

"Sometimes even the bar owners force you to sleep with them so that you can get that job," another said.

Condoms

At the conference it becomes apparent that it is only a thin line that distinguishes a bar hostess from a prostitute.

Hundreds of bar maids are attending the conference

Carey Anyango once aspired to be a nurse. Her dreams were shattered after her parents died in a road crash.

At the age of 25, she has one child, and also fends for her three siblings.

Despite being aware of the devastation caused by HIV/Aids, Ms Anyango says that having sexual relations with her customers is inevitable.

"We use condoms. If you sleep with a man who is not your boyfriend and you don't love him, you just go there for the money. So you use condoms and you forget.

"I have to work like this. I can't go back home without money in the morning, when the kids are crying and want food," she says.

Uphill struggle

Each of the bar maids I came across had a story to tell, and wished she could quit the occupation to find a more respectable job.

As bar hostesses you have the freedoms and rights like any other Kenyans MP Njoki Ndungu

But with high levels of unemployment, the women have no choice but to hang on hoping that some sort of salvation will come their way.

"I think that this conference needs to be the turning point to state that you are a profession like any other," said Njoki Ndungu, a member of parliament and a women's rights activist.

"As bar hostesses you have the freedoms and rights like any other Kenyans. You are entitled to dignity," she told them.

It may be a case of easier said than done for those who work in the industry, as they grapple with a society that seems to see them as available for cheap sexual offers.