After leaving a life of forced prostitution, some women who were trafficked as teens — and never learned to cook from their mothers and grandmothers — now struggle with healthy eating.
“I wasn’t valuing myself,” said one Mexican-born survivor, who the Daily News is calling Sofia to protect her identity. “I’ve now learned that it’s not so much about other people finding us pretty, but being healthy for ourselves.”
Sofia, 38, participated in a new program called Nourish Workshop, started by non-profit Sanctuary for Families and the Lower Eastside Girls Club, which aims to teach sex trafficking survivors about basic nutrition and give them cooking skills as well as a self-esteem boost.
“One of my clients said, ‘We all know what we’ve been through. It’s really hard sometimes when you wake up, and you don’t like what you see in the mirror,'” said Dania Lopez Beltran, a staff attorney at Sanctuary for Families who developed the program.
“Trafficking clients in general have a really hard time being in any kind of a support group … We wanted it to be an activity that they viewed as fun, that was also therapeutic,” she said.
The seven women who participated in the first workshop this spring spent months or years under the control of pimps and their families. A few are from Ecuador, but the majority are from Mexico.
Many — like Sofia — were coerced by “padrotes” from a small town that has become a notorious center of Mexican sex trafficking, Tenancingo in Tlaxcala state.
One of the women was first trafficked at age 9, and forced into prostitution in the U.S. at age 12, according to program organizers.
“Those are just really cherished memories that were stolen from them,” said Lopez Beltran. “After they left their traffickers, they hadn’t been controlling their own food for such a long time.”
Sofia, who now lives in the Bronx, first came to the U.S. with a man she believed loved her. Instead, he forced her into prostitution, she says. After being arrested on prostitution charges three years ago, she told her story to a counselor at the Bronx Family Justice Center and later cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, giving them information about her pimp, said her lawyer, Roxanna Garcia.
She now has a work permit and has been getting work cleaning houses and caring for kids — even as she studies English and takes GED classes in Spanish.
The Nourish Workshop was unlike anything she’d done before, Sofia said — adding that she most enjoyed learning to prepare a shrimp ceviche and how to cook food without frying it.
In evening classes at Lower Eastside Girls Club taught by Sanctuary staff and Girls Club chef Will Pentecost, the women learned knife skills, how to roast vegetables, how to read nutritional labels and even how to quarter a chicken.
Each night, they made a different Mexican-style recipe that had been modified to use whole grains and vegetables.
“Tragically, a lot of these women have not had home situations where they pick up these skills,” said Pentecost. “I feel like we just got a mountain of work done in just a short amount of time.”
Sofia and the other first clients to finish the Nourish Workshop program recently celebrated at the Lower Eastside Girls Club with a dinner of stuffed poblano chile peppers, chicken and vegetable enchiladas, and fresh guacamole.
They took cell phone photos of themselves and their kids enjoying the food.
The program now has a wait list of clients who hope to take the second workshop, which has not yet been scheduled, Lopez Beltran said.
