The van stocked with condoms, candy and compassion rolls past the White House and into Girls Town, where the city's female prostitutes spend their nights. With the emergency hot line number on the outside, humour and advice on the inside, the van is a popular spot on the track.

"Hey, want some free condoms?"

Amy Pettit and Cyndee Clay will call these words dozens of times before 5 a.m., when they turn in for the night. Like children gathering around the ice cream truck, sex workers come running.

"What kind of condoms do you need?" Clay asks.

"Any of them, baby. Any and all of them," replies a woman, as police sirens ring down the street.

HIPS -- helping individual prostitutes survive -- has been cruising the streets since 1993, and on this spring night, it doesn't take long to find sex workers on the job, or "in the game," as insiders say. Drivers loop through Girls Town, Boys Town and the strip where transsexuals -- men dressed as women -- sell their bodies.

Most Americans respond to prostitution by ignoring it, mocking it, condemning it or trying to save young women from it. HIPS simply accepts it, hoping to make inherently dangerous work safer.

On this night, Pettit, Clay and a volunteer driver will chat with 94 sex workers, hand out 860 condoms and a cooler full of candy. They won't rescue anyone from an abusive pimp or talk anybody into leaving the streets. They'll do a lot of listening, a little educating.

******

"I'm soft and smooth," Satin says, explaining her street name.

She has long dark hair and an easy smile -- and a Playboy bunny necklace, high heels, thong underwear and a skirt that covers barely half her bottom.

At 25, she has a confidence suggesting that while she likes the free condoms, she doesn't want much advice. "I'm a really busy girl out here," she says. Eyeing a fender bender down the street, she jokes: "I didn't cause this one!" She laughs. "I've caused a few."

Satin leans into the window of the green van, idling along a street just a few blocks from the White House. Some nights, a medical worker rides along to do HIV testing.

"They give us condoms, which of course we need to stay safe," says Satin, a HIPS fan who has been in the game since last summer. "I go through a lot of condoms."

How does she deal with the risk of HIV infection? "If the condom breaks I go straight to the clinic and get tested," she says.

Pettit sees the opening, a chance to educate. "You know, in an incident like that, if a condom breaks, that incident might not show up on an HIV test for up to six months -- just so you know," she tells Satin.

A little prodding, and Satin lets on that she's not always so together -- like the time she was beaten and raped by a customer and went to HIPS for help.

"They were understanding, you know? They weren't judgmental or anything like that," she says.