All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  After I emceed for a while (they don’t necessarily know my specific films, but boy, do they understand “Hollywood star”) I snuck off to a field with tall grass from which I could watch the spectacle from a distance. I sat very still on the ground, aware of where I was on the globe, the night sky looking so different than it does from our back porch. I peered through the dark, rich air around me, gazing toward the cone of light and eruptions of laughter that pulsed from the circled-up crowd. It was quite a sight. Look at me now, Mamaw and Papaw, playing on a summer’s night.

  The next morning, we drove to another neighborhood on the edge of the city and squeezed through a narrow dirt lane, arriving at a makeshift school for poor kids and AIDS orphans run by Khemara, our partner NGO. The building was no more than a collection of thin straw walls surrounding a clay tile floor with a few woven mats in the middle. The kids did their darling “Oh, here’s the grown-up we are supposed to charm with our songs” routine, and I was charmed indeed. Then they scattered.

  I sat on a mat and waited patiently. Finally, by ones and twos, and then in a swarm, they surrounded me. They had dirty clothes and runny noses, and some of them were visibly malnourished, with the telltale yellow-tinged hair that comes with vitamin deficiency. They were tiny for their age—some of the five- and six-year-olds looked no bigger than toddlers because of stunting—and their eyes were sad beyond their years. Many of the orphans were already HIV-positive.

  After asking permission to hug them—a custom in Cambodia—I cradled them, held their hands, smoothed their hair, and made them giggle. We basically just loved on one another. I spoke in English, trusting that tone and melody would be intuitively understood and felt, giving them my encouragement, prayers, and affirmations. It was difficult to leave, and I struggled to stay on the schedule that had been created.

  My next destination was at the end of the dirt road in a peri-urban slum. It was yet another collection of one-room houses on stilts, with ravines ribbing their way underneath. As we got out to walk, an ebullient little girl with long black hair and a short-sleeved blouse with a Peter Pan collar burst out of the crowd. Before any grown-ups could explain, she leaped onto me, wrapping her legs around my waist and flinging her arms around my neck. Introductions were no longer necessary; she was my next appointment. Ouk Srey Leak was an eleven-year-old AIDS orphan who was being cared for with the help of Khemara. Although her delicate face was sad and serious, she greeted me with unusually intense and spontaneous physical warmth.

  She jumped down, took my hand, and began to pull me toward her home. I asked if, on the way, she would give me a tour of her neighborhood. An important feature we passed was the well that provided her community’s drinking water. It immediately brought to mind the wells on family farms in eastern Kentucky that fascinated me as a child and the deep satisfaction of drinking delicious cold water. Srey Leak’s well looked functional, but of course microbes and parasites are not visible to the naked eye; there was no way to ascertain the quality of this drinking water upon which thousands relied. Diarrheal disease is a massive global public health crisis, the second leading killer of children under the age of five worldwide. PSI addresses unsafe drinking water by socially marketing point-of-use water purification solution, which costs pennies to provide safe water for a family of five for a month. We also socially market and give away oral re-hydration salts, essential for recuperating from otherwise deadly episodes of diarrhea. Srey Leak was very patient with my keen interest in her well, and I was so glad it was nearby. Girls in Southeast Asia can spend up to six hours a day doing chores, much of that time involved in searching for and carrying water.

  Her small hut was where she had lived with her parents until they died of complications of AIDS. She was able to stay here alone with the help of an aunt who lived in the neighborhood and a health care program run by Khemara. I stepped inside her spare, neat wooden hut and felt a shiver of recognition. With a translator seated nearby, I sat on the floor and Srey Leak, whose name means “Perfect Girl,” curled into my lap. I was cross-legged, and we fit together perfectly, as if we belonged just this way. As she nestled up against me, my arms completed the circle of holding, fully enveloping her, and I began to rock her. She relaxed against me as she told me how her parents had died one after the other and how much she wanted a mother. If the rocking slowed, she would press into me, wordlessly letting me know she wanted more. She showed me a small photo album with pictures of her beautiful family—mother, father, and grandparents—enshrined in plastic. It was all she had left of them.

  I told her about my grandparents and softly shared some of the ways I am able to keep my relationship with them dynamic and alive, even though they had passed on from the physical world. Last night, in fact, I had very auspiciously had one of my deep, beautiful, heart-piercing dreams about Mamaw, the kind that happens on occasion and nearly breaks me in half with its bittersweetness. She had come to me just as she had been in life, appearing so naturally and fully that I could see every eyelash, the exact color and flecks of her irises. She had whispered guidance, direction, and care to me, soaking me in the unconditional love she gave me in such abundance in life. I described the dream to Srey Leak and told her how I could tenderly conjure scenes with such attention to detail that I could re-experience my grandparents’ love, walking in my mind’s eye through precious memories. I talked with her about praying.

  I made a stupid mistake while I was trying to be lighthearted for a moment and had changed the subject to daily chores. When I found out that she did the dishes, I exclaimed, “Oh, I had that chore when I was a kid!” I told her I didn’t think that had been fair, as it should have fallen to my older sister, and didn’t she agree? “Aren’t the dishes for the bigger kids in the family?”

  She thought it over and said, “Well, I don’t have anybody.” I felt ashamed—I had forgotten she had no siblings. I said a silent prayer, asking to be taught how to be more considerate. She handled my gaffe with poise.

  We carried on snuggling and talking for the better part of an hour. When it was time to go, Kate and I gave her a wrapped gift box filled with a backpack, clothes, and school and art supplies. I knew her grief transcended being “fixed” by a gift, but I hoped it would keep her mind distracted for a spell.

  I told her I would never forget her, and I asked her to show me where she slept so I could picture here there. She led me to a thin mat on the floor, a few feet from where we had been sitting all this time, in the corner of her hut. I found this especially sad, maybe because of those evenings I’d spent on the bed with Mamaw, and I fought back an urge to sweep her up, carry her on my hip, keep her safe, and bring her home with me.

  It is wholly unnatural to walk away from a child in need, especially one with outstretched arms. It defies my humanity and is easily the hardest part of this job I have so eagerly taken on. I have often pictured Srey Leak in our home, daydreaming that she and the aunt who looks after her have come to live with us. I have stood in the doorway of the guest room in our house I have imagined would be theirs (she would want her aunt to sleep in the same room with her, at least at first). And in my imagination, Srey Leak goes on to assimilate the best of what America has to offer, and whether she grows up to live a quiet, simple life, or has troubles that stem from her many losses, or overcomes those losses and goes on to be of great service to her fellows, I love and accept her unconditionally.

  But she still has a place in Cambodia with her aunt and her people. I know that. And with help from Khemara and PSI, she also has a chance at a better future. I have a picture of her burying herself into me, her eyes a million miles away even as she clings. My chin rests gently on her head. My eyes are closed. I am wearing Mamaw’s pearls, a treasured gift from the woman who taught me to love this way, whose lap was the high holy altar of safety and comfort when I was little. Sometimes still, Tennie, the grandmother of choice God has given me, holds me this way. She has a swing on her screened-in porch, and various of us kids and grandkids wil
l on occasion ask her, “Will you please rock me?” We never outgrow our need to be held.

  I haven’t seen Ouk Srey Leak again, and because of standard personnel changes in our staff in Cambodia, I have sadly lost track of her. Once, though, I received a package from her. She had drawn beautiful pictures for me. One is a pair of hands, reaching up from the bottom of the page as if growing up from the earth. They are cupped. Out of them flows all of creation, all manner of wonderful animals, plants, the sun, moon, and stars. It took my breath away.

  I rock her still.

  That afternoon we flew to Siem Reap, northwest of the capital, where PSI was opening a satellite office to serve Cambodia’s rural areas. We stayed at a beautiful, peaceful hotel near the Angkor Wat temple compound, where the magnificent ruins of Cambodia’s past are being slowly reclaimed from the jungle. I took advantage of a few hours off to hike barefoot through the tangled forest, but I wasn’t fully present. The next morning, I was up early, feeling tight, anxious, and frustrated. After tea, I began recording my daily entry in the video diary I was keeping to be used as part of a documentary for PSI. I set up the camera on my dresser, started to talk about the time I had spent with a tiny orphan the day before, and promptly exploded into tears. Cut. Well, that was a clue to my agitated state. I wept bitterly for Ouk Srey Leak and her grief and for something that her story touched deep in my own heart, something I couldn’t yet name.

  I began to revive during a long drive out through the rural Cambodian countryside. Fresh air, open fields, and gentle farm animals cheered me. The views were lovely, the roads narrow, people few. When we arrived at a wat, or temple, I discovered where a lot of the people were: here, waiting for me! There were village children lining the road, and from a distance the monks in their saffron robes and the white-shirted Buddhist nuns looked like a bouquet of marigolds, dahlias, and zinnias scattered on the pagoda steps.

  The polished stone floor was cool on my bare feet as I was led out of the blazing sun and into the quiet corridors of the simple stone building with a soaring roofline. The monks came filing in and greeted me in an extraordinary and happy ceremony that had me lying prone before them as they chanted a blessing on me. We all sat cross-legged on mats; even the shoeless Papa Jack in his safari vest and khakis managed a half lotus. The head monk led his charges through the prayers, their resonant singsong voices sometimes echoed, and always affirmed, by the rows of observers on either side of the Buddha’s sacred alley. At the end the senior monk spoke special blessings and graced me by gently tossing sprays of jasmine blossoms and lotus flowers. Praying? Flowers? It was a dream come true.

  As if that weren’t transporting enough, I then went outside, where I was surrounded by the “wat grannies,” a posse of five-foot-nothing, shaved-headed Buddhist nuns, mostly toothless women with brown, weathered faces who pawed me into a state of belovedness. Through my translator they murmured beautiful, hopeful things to me about well-being, long life, responsible and giving nature, and future happiness. I instantly adored them. I soaked them up and kissed them and held them while the most toothless of the bunch cheerfully gummed my arm. I showed them a picture of Dario and told them that I hoped to bring my handsome husband for them to meet someday. They laughed and clucked like happy hens as they passed around fresh coconuts to sip the cool, sweet milk.

  The wat grannies are part of a PSI program funded by USAID that pairs vulnerable, at-risk children from the countryside with surrogate grandmothers. The elderly nuns each take five or six children and basically do to them what they did to me: love them. They mentor the children and help educate mothers (if they haven’t migrated to the city for work) about proper child care. Most important, they provide compassion, wisdom, and continuity in a place that is still reeling from the ravages of war and cultural annihilation.

  I crossed the yard to a two-walled thatched hut on stilts in which thirty-five women sat with their babies. They were taking a course in mother-child nutrition as well as medically accurate, detailed reproductive health education. I learned that they had never been taught about sex or had any child care instruction before this program. The most schooling any of them had was four years of primary school, so they could barely read. The instructors used colorful, easy-to-identify illustrations to supplement the lessons. Today the women were learning the basics of breast-feeding. Some of the most dynamic of them would be trained as peer leaders, to reach out to those who had not attended the programs—a specialty of PSI and its partners.

  When school was over, we had a kaffeeklatsch, hut style. Sisterhood is delicious wherever one finds it. We shot the breeze for more than an hour, sometimes giggling, as the women told me about their lives. When I asked one of them what she called her six-week-old baby, she thought for a minute, then replied, “Naughty.” The women howled.

  I think the classes were also a welcome break from the grueling routine of rice farming. They rose at four a.m., worked in the fields all day, then prepared the meals—always rice, sometimes seasoned with fish—before going to bed at eight p.m. There was no electricity and not much entertainment. But the women told me they loved to sing, and I cajoled them into a song—a haunting, trilling melody that somehow survived the years of killing. Song, spirit, memory. Some things simply cannot be erased.

  So my last day in Cambodia, spent with the poor, illiterate, subsistence rice farmers of a postconflict nation, was glorious.

  That night, I unfolded my mat in the hotel room and said a grateful prayer:

  Thank you for toothless old women.

  Thank you for tender young mothers.

  Thank you for jumpy kids who don’t trust outsiders but are so quick to laugh and play.

  Thank you for wide-eyed babies.

  Chapter 7

  AVENGING ANGEL OF THE SISTERHOOD

  Never underestimate the power and love of grandmothers.

  Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

  No hands, no feet but yours,

  Yours are the eyes through which is to look out

  Christ’s compassion to the world

  Yours are the feet with which he is

  To go about doing good;

  Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

  —SAINT TERESA OF AVILA

  y the end of my first full day in Thailand, I had an idea for my next thriller movie: I was going to play an avenging angel of the sisterhood who rescued women who were trapped in brothels. I would work subtly and quietly in the dark, in ways so covert that my movements would go unnoticed until my sisters were safe in my arms and on their way to freedom. Then, in giant, thunderous strokes, I would overturn the operations that kidnap women and children to sell for sex. For the sequel, I planned a full-on superhero turn, upending poverty, banishing ignorance, leveling the land for the light of equality and dignity to shine across.

  It was a tantalizing fantasy, but sometimes there are problems that even superheroes can’t fix in a flash. That was the lesson I learned in a grubby, neon-glitzy karaoke bar in Pattaya.

  The day had started with a routine visit to the brand-new PSI offices in Bangkok. I was trying to adjust to the modern, high-rise bustle of Thailand’s capital, only an hour’s flight away but decades removed from the economic stagnation, quiet rice paddies, pagodas, and small huts of Cambodia. The office is situated in a gleaming modern tower in the city center. Vibrant, full-color posters showcasing savvy use of media and pop culture to reach young people lined the walls. Slick PSI-generated commercials with positive behavior change messages were playing on TVs.

  I loved meeting the field staff, remarkable, dedicated people whose whole career paths are spent serving people in need. Olivier Le Touze, PSI’s then deputy country director in Thailand, at the border with Bangladesh was a young Frenchman whose first job was in Burma, helping refugees fleeing forced sterilization (a form of ethnic control). I had never even heard of such a thing, much less someone whose dream job straight out of college was to tackle this form of human rights
abuse. I also met John Hetherington, who was relieved to be stationed in Bangkok after years in Karachi, where he and his family had to be evacuated five times after threats by militant Islamists. Working in the developing world to improve reproductive health, curb the tide of HIV/AIDS, and prevent disease is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes reaching the most at-risk people means putting your own life on the line. It is important to me to spend time with local staff, from the technical teams to marketing specialists, those writing grant applications and those in accounting, the peer educators and the drivers, the demographers, those in research and metrics, all of them, to honor them for their often unnoticed, underrewarded work and indeed the miracles they make happen every day.

  Thailand was spared the ravages of war, mass murder, and fanatical leadership that hobbled its neighbors in Southeast Asia during the last century. With its infrastructure intact and an infusion of American cash, Thailand experienced an economic boom during the Vietnam War and continued to thrive in the postconflict era. Despite the current global economic meltdown, its manufacturing sector is strong, and Thailand exports more rice than any other country. But it is probably better known as a tourist destination. Most of the foreign visitors come for the golden pagodas and white-sand beaches, but a sickening percentage of them are here for sex, a readily available and very cheap commodity.

  HIV/AIDS first appeared in Thailand in the mid-1980s among the male and female prostituted sex workers and intravenous drug users. From there the virus made its inevitable journey into the general population, as husbands brought it home to their wives, who then gave birth to infected babies. Unlike many governments that denied or ignored the epidemic, the Thai leadership mobilized early with a comprehensive education and prevention program. The authorities required all prostitutes to use condoms, which were manufactured and distributed by an amazingly practical Thai politician and businessman named Mechai Viravaidya, also known as “Mr. Condom.” The campaign had astonishing results: After an all-time high of 143,000 new HIV infections in 1991, the number fell to 19,000 in 2003; and overall, HIV was reduced by a jaw-dropping 90 percent. Thailand proved that clever intervention works. Mechai calls condoms “weapons of mass protection.”