The road across the border doesn't go to the promised land

"I want to forget the past and now try to improve my life," said Sonia, examining with satisfaction her new home, a small one-bedroomed brick house without electricity or water on the outskirts of the Mozambican capital, Maputo. It is being built for her by Rede Came, a local NGO formed to help people overcome the trauma of trafficking and sexual abuse. When the electricity is connected, Sonia will be able to use her home as a base for her small business. Sonia, 34, has come a long way. Three years ago she was unemployed and jumped at the chance of a job as a domestic worker in neighbouring South Africa, working for a friend of her sister's. She was promised R1,000 (US $166) a month, a considerable amount of money for someone who only finished the 5th grade of primary school, in a country with a minimum wage of 1.2 million Meticais ($48). Although she had no passport or work permit, "they told me they would look after everything", she said. "A Mozambican man told me where they would pick me up, so I just waited at the roadside. There were others in the car, but I didn't talk to them." Near the South African border, at around seven in the evening, "A man led us through the bush, and up the hills. I was scared, but what could I do? I got very frightened when dogs started barking at us, and the South African police arrested us all. But then the man paid money to the police and they let us go." She was taken by bus to Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, and began working, as planned, with her sister's acquaintance, a Mozambican woman with an 11-year-old son. But she was not paid what had been promised, and eventually she ran away, even though she did not have a passport and was in the country illegally. To make end meet, Sonia joined a group of sex workers. "I just did it to survive," she explained. Without official papers she was extremely vulnerable, and when she was raped by four men, was too afraid to go to the police. A church group came to Sonia's rescue when she was pregnant and very ill. At the hospital she found out she was also HIV positive. "I told them I just want to go home," she said. The church contacted the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who arranged for her return to Mozambique. She has been home for a year now, selling fish and ice pops to get by. Her twins - a girl and a boy - are now nine months old, but only weigh around five kilos and are losing weight. Sonia, who had just returned from the hospital, was clearly worried. "I don't want to think too much," she told IRIN. Mozambican women and girls fall victim to smugglers usually because they are poor and uneducated, and believe they can make a decent living in wealthy South Africa. But people smuggling can lead to trafficking: the forced sexual or labour exploitation of persons held in conditions of servitude. Despite campaigns against trafficking by Rede Came and other agencies, like Federation of Terres Des Hommes and Save the Children, no law has been passed to ban the practice in Mozambique, making it difficult to prosecute. According to Carlos Manjate, the coordinator of Rede Came, the police reported 237 cases of child trafficking in 2004. "That is the tip of the iceberg," he commented. "Most cases go unnoticed, and most of the perpetrators are left unpunished." This year two men were arrested for attempting to smuggle 43 people from rural areas in the central provinces of Sofala and Manica into South Africa on a bus. "These areas are very poor and vulnerable to drought," Manjate explained. Many illegal migrants in South Africa are Mozambicans. Those caught by the authorities are held in the notorious Lindela detention centre outside Johannesburg before being put on a sealed train to the border and repatriated. Many of them repeatedly try to cross the border, despite the risk of exploitation that goes with living on the margins of society as an undocumented migrant in South Africa.