After human traffickers took Chinese women to work in Africa as prostitutes, local and Chinese police mounted (is that the right word?) an operation to save them. But they don’t want to go home.

Police from China flew to the Democratic Republic of Congo in November in the country’s first operation to rescue women trafficked to Africa, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

They found 11 Chinese women who had been promised decent jobs in Paris by traffickers but ended up working in a Chinese-owned karaoke bar in the country’s capital Kinshasa, the newspaper said.

After a joint raid by Chinese and Congolese police on the karaoke bar, however, the women decided to stay in the country, saying it was easier to make good money there than in China.

Luckily the girls have other people willing to help them too. Under an Obama “stimulus” initiative, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are spending $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job. Apparently if they are sober they’re less likely to pass on nasty scratchy diseases.

Which is nice.