Rozana Ramos found herself living on the streets at 16, trying to survive in one of Sao Paolo's most notorious areas, Cracolandia, literally, land of crack.
Rozana arrived Sao Paolo in 1989, fleeing an abusive childhood which had seen her sexually assaulted, forced into servitude and abandoned to die.
Shoeless and wearing a green jumper which she wouldn't take off for the next three years...
Today she has a book (cover picture above) 'x-raying' her sojourn through life. Today, she is a successful businesswoman in Hertfordshire, but she traveled through a lot... to get here.
Rozana Ramos' first night on the streets were spent in the glow of the fire engulfing two writhing bodies, people burnt alive for the amusement of passing teenagers.
They knew - and the 16-year-old Rozana would learn - that the authorities would never pursue them, relieved to have two drug-addled 'zombies' off their hands.
It was a harsh introduction to the streets of Sao Paolo's Cracolandia - a place quite literally named for the drug which had ruined so many of its inhabitants' lives.
Police said the streets here were full of the living dead - a place where killings, mutilations and child prostitution were the norm, where it is impossible to distinguish whether the emaciated residents are boys or girls, adults or children.
She was taken to Cracolandia by Hiago, a gang leader who first tried to rob her, before rescuing her.
'He said that if I stayed another night on the street on my own I would be killed or abducted,' Rozana recalled. 'It was safer to go with him.'
His base was Cracolandia, a god-forsaken place built out of a disused bus station near Luz. To this day, officials describe its inhabitants as 'zombies', the living dead.
'I could make out the forms of drug-addled bodies slumped on the streets,' she said. 'It was impossible to distinguish boys from girls, children from adults.'
That night, the bewildered and scared Rozana found a gap to sleep between the addicts that lined the filthy pavements. 'I couldn't tell if they were dead or alive. Those who weren't unconscious were openly smoking crack or defecating where they stood.'
'Hiago kept me close to him. He was all I had for protection. I knew instinctively that I was here to stay.' Rozana began to learn how to survive in Cracolandia. She started to deliver drugs and guns for dealers who would be only too willing to kill her if she failed to do their bidding. 'In Cracolandia, if a drug dealer tells you to do something, you do it.' But even bending to the will of the dealers did not guarantee survival. 'Most people live in Cracolandia a few years and then they are dead. You don't survive there.' 'Without Hiago's protection, I would have been dead,' Rozana added.
'Another girl in our gang, Roza, was just 10 years old. One day I woke up to find she'd disappeared. We never saw her again.'
'Out of our original group only Hiago, myself and one other survived. Every day one of our number would disappear and a new one would join.'
Rescue came when she was out begging. 'I was really dirty and rough, and one lady stopped and said, 'Rozana, is that you?'' That woman was Stephanie, a travel agent who had offered the young girl a job years earlier - a job she turned down because she was too ashamed to reveal she was living on the streets.
Offered a new job, it was a fresh start - but Cracolandia was not willing to release her from its grasp just yet.
Still unable to afford housing on her new wage, Rozana took up the offer of one of her drugs' customers to sleep in the basement of a building where he worked as a security guard. In exchange she agreed to provide him with drugs which she paid for herself.
'I'd shower at work, dress in my clean clothes and then in the evenings I'd change back into my homeless clothes and make my face dirty so that no one would suspect I was preparing to leave.'
But Rozana was smart, and worked her way up to merchandising director for Brazil - allowing her to finally escape for good.
Yet, Rozana says, fate took another evil turn. She was drugged and kidnapped by a police officer who kept her prisoner in his apartment for three months. He chained her by the ankle and subjected her to unspeakable acts of depravity. She found hairs and bloodstains of other girls held captive before her, their initials carved in the wall behind the bed. She knew he intended to kill her.
Once again her survival instinct kicked in. 'I pretended I was in love with him and wanted to marry him. Soon he began to trust me enough to leave me unchained and one day I jumped out of the window to the ground below and ran from that place.'
Refusing to be defeated by her ordeal, Rozana returned to work and in 2000 was offered a position in the UK as an international representative.
Now running a successful cleaning company, she lives in Hertfordshire in a £400,000 three-bedroom home with her two teenage children she had with the Scottish ex-husband she met when she first arrived in London.
It's a world away from the one she spent her own teenage years in.
Culled from MailOnline
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