In Northwest Dallas, Volunteers Go Searching for Prostitutes to Save Them

"I couldn't even turn tricks if I wanted to, I'm so tired," said the woman sitting beneath the train tracks, clutching her gut and crying beneath the knit cap and winter jacket and despair and pain. "Cervical cancer," she said between teardrops. She said doctors detected it Nov. 8. The radiation and chemo have taken their toll. But the woman hasn't been to Parkland Memorial Hospital for treatment in two weeks. After she fled a bad situation — drugs, she said, and violence — she came to the train tracks stretched over Northwest Highway at Denton Drive, beneath which lies one of the countless homeless where bodies and belongings are stuffed into the spaces where the slick concrete slopes upward toward support beams.This was Wednesday, around 1:30 p.m., just as the early week's chill started its retreat. The sleeping had begun to thaw, stir and stretch.I came here, behind a Fox Fuels and an old movie theater converted into a dance club, with a small group of volunteers who search for women who want to get off the streets but can't because their pimps won't let them. Or because they have nowhere else to go. Or, like the woman with cancer huddled beside her only bag of belongings, because they have just given up.  Continue reading...