On a crisp November afternoon, as the sun began to set, a car rolled to a stop in a Southwest Baltimore alley.
A woman approached the vehicle, her thin frame swallowed by an oversized gray sweatshirt, a beanie pulled low over her head. Since she’d slipped back into addiction, she’d been trading pieces of herself to scrape by.
But this time, when she leaned into the window, there wasn’t a john behind the wheel. Instead, the driver offered a black winter coat. Hand warmers. Socks. A turkey and cheese sandwich, neatly wrapped in a bright pink bag. Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks.
“I’m Kristina,” the driver said.
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Most every Tuesday and Thursday evening, Kristina Page zigzags down Wilkens Avenue, crossing into Morrell Park to seek out the women most ignore, sex workers who are battling addiction.
Women like these fall through the cracks, forgotten in a city flooded with programs — but ones that for policy and practical reasons often fail to help them. Shelters tend to ban sex workers, afraid they’ll bring their clients. Domestic violence groups shy away, unwilling to navigate the legal gray areas of the workers’ trade. Many addiction treatment centers don’t address underlying trauma.
And city officials? They often turn a blind eye, Page says, letting these women disappear into Baltimore’s maze of abandoned homes.
Page sees herself as a bridge, a “connector” who helps these women get what they need. That’s everything from food and warm clothes to STD tests, government identification, and, most importantly, access to addiction resources.
Wiping away the tears, the woman told Page she wanted to get clean again. She’d done it before — five steady years on methadone — until a recent relapse. The Banner is not naming the workers due to the sensitivity of the subject matter and safety concerns.
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Page paused, her mind flipping through the catalog of clinics and programs she’d collected over the years. She mentioned a nearby methadone clinic. The woman seemed interested but hesitant. Page held out a flier with her number on it, offering to talk more.
“But if you ever change your mind with me, I’m still gonna be here,” Page said. “There’s no judgment.”
She nodded and grabbed the paper. Then the woman in the gray sweatshirt stepped back from the car.
Before her rounds, Page packs her white Honda with 30 lunches, clean clothes and overdose medication. She takes the same route through the same streets, searching for familiar faces. Once a month, she sets up a resource fair outside the Wilkens Avenue Mennonite Church, offering hot meals, fentanyl testing strips, wound-care kits and whatever else she can scrape together — makeup, bras, tampons, toothbrushes.
This rhythm of weekly drives and monthly fairs is how Page walks the fine line between helping and holding back. Each trip gives her time to build trust with the women she meets, to offer support without fostering reliance. And when they’re ready to consider addiction treatment, she’s there to help.
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“I get lumped into this category of ‘a working girl,’” a woman said at one of Page’s resource fairs. “But she sees me, and it feels so good for someone to actually treat me like a human being.”
Page, who is 44 and lives in Baltimore County, worked social services for about two decades. A Maryland native, she spent years as a case manager at a treatment clinic in a Baltimore hospital and then more than a decade at a domestic violence nonprofit, rising to associate director. In her spare time, she’d load her three kids into the car and head to Wilkens Avenue, handing out food and clothes to anyone who needed them.
It didn’t take long for her to notice a troubling pattern: Most of the women she met on the streets never made it through the doors of the nonprofits she worked for. A few years ago, Page decided to step away from the office and focus entirely on outreach. Someone had to fill the gap. She figured it might as well be her.
Page has kept her operation, called Lotus Coordinated Services, intentionally small, unregistered and outside the nonprofit system. Without the paperwork and grant restrictions, Page says she can help anyone, any way she wants. No salary, no cut for herself. (She supports herself through a day job running a moving company.)
Almost everything she gives away comes from crowdsourcing on Facebook and corporate donations. It’s a patchwork operation she has stitched together, one post, one connection at a time.
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What Page brings on her drives depends on the season. In the summer, she focuses on food and water. On warm nights, Wilkens Avenue and Morrell Park hum with activity, making it easy for Page to find 30 people to feed.
But just after 4 p.m. on this November afternoon, the sharp wind had driven the temperature close to freezing, and the usual buzz on the streets had quieted.
“You just have to be more creative with finding them,” Page said.
She made her a loop past a roundabout on Wilkens Avenue, slowing near the vacant houses where the women often gathered. Soon, a few appeared, walking down the sidewalk, some waving as they spotted her. The clothes and blankets went quickly.
“That was our last two blankets,” Page said 10 minutes into her route, after handing some to a man and woman huddled outside a boarded-up rowhome. The pile of winter coats, hats and shoes stashed in her back seat shrank with each stop.
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Page often says addiction bends time, stretching days into weeks and weeks into months until everything dissolves into the haze of the next high. That’s why she comes back every week. In a world where time drifts away, she believes, showing up consistently can make all the difference.
For her, it’s not about the dozens of people she has guided into treatment or the hundreds of meals she hands out every month. It’s about the moments that can’t be tallied: A girl who’s ignored her for weeks finally accepting a lunch. Someone trusting her enough to share their name, their story.
By 5 p.m., Page had wound her way to Morrell Park, driving slowly along Washington Boulevard, turning onto side streets, her eyes scanning. Outside a convenience store, she spotted a dark-haired woman she’d helped many times before, slumped on the ground.
Page parked and rushed out, kneeling beside her. For 20 minutes, she stayed there, checking her pulse, listening to her slurred, groggy words, overdose medication at the ready.
“She’s breathing fine, just really high,” Page said, her voice calm. She grabbed a pink lunch bag, a jacket and a hat from her Honda, setting them beside the woman.
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“I hate seeing her like this,” she said softly, sliding back into the driver seat.
Such scenes have become routine for Page. The women collapsed on sidewalks, the ones who vanish without a trace. But lately, she says, she’s had more hope.
Johns Hopkins-affiliated SPARC, which stands for Sex workers Promoting Action, Risk reduction, and Community mobilization, has become an essential ally in her efforts. Bonnie Marquez, who runs the Facebook group Missing in Baltimore City, is always ready to help her search when another woman disappears. And then there’s Page herself, relying on hard-won trust and years of experience. Bit by bit, she says, she and others are making a difference.
By 6 p.m., with the sun long gone, Page handed out the last meal of the night. Around the corner, she spotted two more women walking down the street.
“It almost feels like you never have enough stuff,” she said.
Driving up North Avenue toward home, her phone rang.
It was the woman in the gray sweatshirt. Page smiled.
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