The Sunday News
Rumbidzai Mbewe, Sunday Life Correspondent
LAST year they took social networks by surprise when they announced that they were a couple. They still are keeping people on their toes by making them guess what could be the next step in their relationship.
While everyone is still trying to catch up with their relationship, Olinda Chapel and Njabulo Nkomo popularly known in the entertainment industries as Tytan, are doing charity work in their communities.
Taking to Facebook, Olinda wrote to President Emmerson Mnangagwa on the hardships that the girl child goes through due to poverty. She narrated how she is haunted by the voices of some of the children that she talked to during her visit to Epworth in Harare.
Through her foundation, The Olinda Chapel Foundation, a number of Zimbabweans who stay in the United Kingdom donated clothes, sanitary pads and diapers which were given to the girls in the Epworth community with the help of Tytan and other young people who are social figures.
Olinda said during her visit, she sat down with community leaders who introduced her to some of the young girls who told her different stories of how they managed to earn a living in their situation.
“I sat with these girls and I listened attentively to their stories. Stories of child headed families, stories of young girls as young as nine engaging in prostitution, stories of 14-year-olds being HIV positive after contracting the disease while selling sex,” she wrote.
She said these young girls, despite their HIV status continue to sell unprotected sex, promoting the cycle of new infections. She expressed disgust over men who buy sex from young girls, who at times paid them $0,50 for their services or nothing.
“I sat down with five young girls all under the age of 18 and three of them had babies on their backs. These girls had no knowledge of their children’s paternity due to conception being a ‘work accident’. Sometimes all they are left with are bruises and scars,” she wrote.
Olinda pleaded with the President to engage relevant authorities to sort out the predicament that young girls were going through. She called for the arrest of men buying sex from young girls.
Research suggests that there could be as many as 10 million children involved in child prostitution worldwide, but the actual statistics for the numbers of child prostitutes in Zimbabwe are still difficult to obtain.
