There is so much to talk about!
Okay….so first of all, while I was staying in Skopje, Macedonia, on my way back to Belgrade, I finally got to meet with some folks from HOPS, an NGO that provides services to sex workers, and STAR, a sex worker rights organizing group. We compared notes over pizza and coffee.
Healthy Options Project Skopje, or HOPS has some similar services as St. James Infirmary. They have pretty comprehensive medical services, testing, and obgyn. They also have a mobile van that goes out once or twice a month to provide testing. They have a drop-in center, where there are workshops for sex workers, as well as programs for children of sex workers. One day a week, they have a hairstylist (whom I met!), another day they have a legal advisor, and every day they have laundry and showers available, as well as social workers.
HOPS is made up of many social workers, and people without sex worker experience, but members of the outreach team are from the sex worker community, and they have someone they call the “housewife” employed there, who is also a sex worker, who helps with the cleaning, chats with the sex workers and serves coffee and tea at the drop in center.
They talked about three main areas where sex work happens in Macedonia: outdoors in the “open scene”, indoors, and in the Roma community. Outreach workers go regularly to the open scene and the Roma Community, and they are working hard to reach the people who work indoors, though this is more difficult for them.
In the Roma community, they were able to first find sex workers who were men who had sex with men, and then they were able to connect with the female-bodied sex workers, and the transgender sex workers, because they all knew one another, and hung out together. I thought this was really interesting and great – because my experiences in San Francisco, sex workers of different genders do not necessarily hang out, or know each other. It sounded like within that there was a strong community of Roma sex workers who look out for one another.
HOPS gets their funding from the Global fund, and they have coaltions with GLBT groups, as well as youth services groups. Their funding seems to be pretty good, as their drop in center is open five days a week, and they have so many services. They are also helping groups in three other Macedonian cities set up their own versions of HOPS.
Another interesting thing about HOPS is that they do outreach to clients of sex workers as well, giving them safer sex supplies, information, and even providing them with testing through the mobile van. The drop in center is only for the sex workers, though.
HOPS has operated
From left to right: Katerina Partinov, assistant director, outreach coordinator for HOPS; Voskre Numoska, social worker HOPS, Borce Bozinov, outreach worker, hairstylist, and STAR organizer, me
since 2000.
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