All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  In spite of shaky legs, aching hips, the sweats, and the often abrupt need to run to the toilet, I not only got through the day, but with my PSI/YouthAIDS team ran a very successful afternoon meeting with Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister of Thailand. It turned out that he had studied at Eastern Kentucky University and he’d been at the Kentucky Derby in 1973 when Secretariat won. I fussed over him for that. I also took the opportunity to affirm his government’s stance on expanding access to anti-AIDS drugs. Since he had been in office, dozens of hospitals in Thailand had stepped up distribution of the potent antiretroviral cocktail that was keeping patients alive. And the government was defying the pharmaceutical companies by using cheaper generic drugs to keep the costs down.

  Because PSI was new to his country, this was our big chance to introduce him to our programs and gain his support. The PM listened with great interest as we described what we do, emphasizing prevention and government partnerships. We were all thrilled when he offered PSI the full support of his government. I felt like high-fiving everyone but worried about how I stank from all the adrenaline that was running through me.

  Then, at last, having made it through the day, I went back to the hotel and took a bath. I watched TV for the first time since I’d left America, a Discovery Channel program about chimps. Perfect. It helped me realize how deeply I had gone into the trouble of our world, how much I had almost lost myself in it. I determined to keep my equanimity, to find a way to stay in the work and not burn out. I then proceeded to sleep twelve and a half hours—by no means a personal best, but still impressive. When I woke I was still shaky, but I was not throwing up, I was not crying, and I was ready to fight.

  Most of my week in Thailand was taken up with events surrounding the huge international AIDS conference, organized by the Geneva-based International AIDS Society and the Thai Ministry of Health, being held in a vast conference center on the outskirts of Bangkok. There were seventeen thousand participants from 160 countries. These unwieldy meetings are held every two years to keep the flow of information fresh and promote the exchange of new ideas to fight this mutating monster. The theme of this conference was “Access for All,” referring to the disparity in AIDS treatment and prevention between rich and poor countries in the global North and South. But the big news was the increasing impact of the epidemic on women and children caused by gender inequality and harmful gendered cultural practices: There were an estimated thirty-eight million people on the planet living with HIV/AIDS, and for the first time, the number of women with HIV surpassed the number of men. During the previous year alone, there were an estimated five million new cases of HIV infection, including more than six hundred thousand children younger than fifteen. By now I had become a full-blown evangelist for PSI’s emphasis on prevention, using private sector techniques to deliver health products and services to the poor and vulnerable, and my confidence increased with every press conference, panel discussion, and cocktail party I attended that week. I tried to be methodical and calm and completely prepared. I saw the great Jim Kim, the Harvard doctor I’d befriended on the “Heart of America” tour. A brilliant and beautiful spirit, cofounder of the community-based NGO Partners in Health, Dr. Kim was now running the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS program and heading up an initiative called 3-by-5, which lobbied to get three million HIV patients in the developing world on AIDS drugs by the year 2005. The fact that he was having trouble meeting the goal said a lot about our inability to deal with the pandemic.

  I quickly learned that these huge international conferences are three-ring circuses: In the first ring, there’s the formal meeting of delegates who listen to lectures and speeches (this year by dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela and then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan) and then break into sessions to share the latest AIDS research and data. In the second ring, nongovernmental organizations set up little booths to explain and promote their programs and strategies. This is always the livelier gathering, part carnival, part trade show. One afternoon, Kate and I decided to take a tour of the exhibits and stop in at the PSI booth. But on the way we had to pass through the third ring of the circus, a section of the conference center set aside for displays by the corporate sponsors. When I had a look at the GlaxoSmithKline installation, I stopped dead in my tracks: The global pharmaceutical giant was celebrating and promoting itself in a two-story “booth” within the cavernous hall, which included a chic café/bar, a posh lounge area (ample enough for sleeping, which some people were), and no fewer than four two-story waterfalls. GSK were giving away free stuff and were mobbed by a long queue. They had massive full-color displays and sharp-looking executives who’d buzzed in to see what all the fuss was about.

  I whirled and huffed at Kate, “How much do you think this cost?!”

  “I’d say about five million,” she said. (Kate loves to wind me up.)

  I stormed into the minimall of a booth and collared the man who seemed to be in charge. I guess I could be methodical and calm for only so long. “Why are you spending such an obnoxious amount of money on this exhibit?” I demanded. “Don’t you see how wrong this is?”

  The guy glanced around the room for help while Kate and Papa Jack sidled closer to me.

  “Think of how many sick mothers you could help for the cost of those waterfalls!” I said. Now Kate was tugging my arm. “Or better yet, you could have given that money to PSI to prevent a bunch of at-risk kids from becoming infected in the first place.”

  I had more points to make, but some GSK security guards came over and basically threw us out. Kate had to struggle to keep a straight face.

  “Ashley, what was the point of that?”

  “I don’t know, but I feel better now!”

  When I phoned my mother and told her of my antics, she told me she was very proud of me and my actions would no doubt resonate.

  Later on I went to the plenary hall to open a session on “cross-generational sex” (a now common term coined by a PSI researcher), a practice that is deadly and alarmingly common in sub-Saharan Africa. Basically, younger, vulnerable women—often children—are taken in by older men, used for sex, and frequently infected with HIV. Girls have to be educated about the dangers and empowered to say no to the sugar daddies. The speakers were so impressive, and my mind kept drifting to thoughts of Africa. It was the continent most affected by HIV/AIDS: Twenty-five million people were already living with the virus, and 95 percent of the world’s twelve million AIDS orphans lived there. I had heard so much about it from Bono, its ravages and its dreams, its elegance and its despair. I had not yet finished this journey in Asia, but I already knew where I had to go next.

  Chapter 9

  EURYDICE IN AFRICA

  In an odious brothel, holding the sweet and sad Shola.

  Our recovery can be measured by the ease of our comings and goings.

  —VIRGINIA SATIR

  he sights, smells, and customs of Thailand and Cambodia lingered with me for weeks after my return. With each person I greeted, I naturally put my hands to my heart in namaste. If I saw a Buddha, I placed my hands in prayer at my third eye. I could feel the presence of my farm friend in the fabric of the grubby linen pants that I wore in Bangkok, which I folded and stored away without washing as a precious physical reminder of the trip. I could be transported back to the pagodas at the sound of a wind chime on the porch. Kate had warned me that I might have some trouble with reentry, and she was right. It was lovely to be home again at our farm in Tennessee, but I felt uneasy. I was shocked by the opulence in America, overwhelmed by the colossal shiny trucks on the highway, the towering stacks of produce at the supermarket, the fifty choices of breakfast cereal, the trash bins overflowing with casually wasted objects that would have been treasured by my friends the wat grannies or the orphans of Phnom Penh who have so little.

  Day after day I sat at my desk, attempting to write letters to potential donors, trying to reduce the story of my journey to a few attention-grabbing anecdotes that would compel them
to send checks to organizations like PSI and grassroots programs that save lives.

  How could I tell them that Ouk Srey Leak was real, that she needed us? That the exploited women in Pattaya were not strangers, but our sisters? The only way I could express my thoughts was in a diary, just like the one I wrote in hotel rooms in Southeast Asia:

  August 2004

  And now, once again, I am home, and at a loss.

  I am surrounded by beauty, and I have my routines—whether it’s drinking tea in bed or baking fresh peach pies or laboring over a dinner table to bring it to its ultimate high summer perfection. Some days I go through my roses, plant by plant, and devise the demise of hundreds of Japanese beetles, then gather baskets full of botanical glory and fritter away hours making them look just right in little vases all over the house. I read scripts lying in the sun and in the steam room. We go to Sister’s for supper. I occasionally help looking after our family’s young’uns, I win and lose at badminton. I go to my husband’s races and sleep twelve hours a night on the bus, even with those noisy race cars on the track. And sometimes, like tonight, in spite of all my life’s beauty, abundance, comfort, and grace, I lie awake sleepless and disturbed.

  I wonder what sort of day Ouk Srey Leak has had. I picture her on her nylon mat in the corner, blanketless and pillowless and I worry about a young man I met in his tiny, clean hut, so ill he could not lift his head, his one-armed father peddling herbs to raise capital to buy medicine for his child. I wonder if the other son, the mentally ill one, will ever have any kind of proper mental health care, if he is abused as he wanders around the slums every day. I wonder about all the desperately ill people I met in hospices in both Cambodia and Thailand, and whether they are dead or alive, and if they have passed, did they go gently? I hope so. I hope so.

  Oh, this little old house, this humble farmhouse that has held Meacham dreams and sorrows and prayers for so many generations, decade upon decade of supplications for healthy crops and safe children, can you hold my dreams? Can you hold my tears cried again and again for the unsafe children and the sad women I met, and for the millions upon millions I did not?

  Much has already come from my trip. We’ve raised almost half our goal monies, Glamour magazine is incorporating fabulously helpful YouthAIDS stuff in my October cover story. Sister is involved, corralling talent for a World AIDS Day concert, and Kate and I are a knockout on the phone together pinning down donors to write those checks.

  But for some reason … that’s silly, I know what the reason is … but tonight, as I do many nights, I am suffering. I miss my husband, who is away preparing for a race. I am still carrying a deep cough in my lungs, a holdover from the Myanmar hill tribe kids at the homeless youth shelter. Our cats are deeply in love with me, but rather than enjoying it, it merely highlights how casually they can treat us when we’re away a lot. (Much to my chagrin, Dario does not seem to be relenting on the “No cats on the bus for race weekends” rule.) I am hardly writhing in bed as I did in Bangkok, but the malaise is real.

  And so the only thing to do, as ever, is to pray. I’ll listen to the depth of the countryside on this fresh August night, unroll a yoga mat, and take it to the Lord in prayer.

  Upon my return, PSI invited me to join its board of directors, an honor I was overjoyed to accept. I would now have a seat at the table among highly qualified public health and technical experts such as Professor Malcolm Potts, a world-renowned reproductive health specialist. I would learn about problems and solutions in greater detail, provide my board cohort with detailed information about our programs on the ground based on ever-increasing personal experience, and help shape the organization’s future. My first order of business was to earnestly advocate diversifying the board in terms of gender, age, race, and geography. Perhaps my proudest moment thus far has been helping to secure an enormous, anonymous donation to provide long-lasting, reversible contraceptives to women in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa. (The program became an unqualified success by 2010, helping to avert three million unintended pregnancies among poor women every year.)

  We began planning my trip to Africa as soon as I returned from the Bangkok AIDS conference. We decided to focus on PSI partners in Kenya, Madagascar, and South Africa and the distinct challenges each faced in the fight against HIV/AIDS and other preventable diseases. Because I would be on camera so often on this trip filming a VH1 AIDS documentary and I would also be doing a cover shoot for Condé Nast Traveler in South Africa (another way to promote grassroots work), I decided to invite my longtime friend, gifted painter and makeup artist Moyra Mulholland, to come along. Moyra grew up on a farm in South Africa during apartheid and studied fine arts at the University of Cape Town before moving to the States, so she was already familiar with some of the grimmer realities of life in Africa. Over the years we’ve grown very close, and I couldn’t think of a better companion for what I knew would be another emotionally grueling journey.

  But before we embarked, Moyra and I had one piece of business to finish: the 2005 Golden Globe Awards, which were held the night before I was scheduled to depart for Kenya. The Golden Globes are the season’s first display of Hollywood opulence and glamour, and they have always been special to me because of my best actress nomination for Ruby in Paradise, which auspiciously launched my career in films. This time I was up for best actress in a musical or comedy for my role as Cole Porter’s wife, Linda, in De-Lovely. My costar and screen husband, Kevin Kline, was nominated for best actor, so it was going to be a fun night.

  On the day of the show, our suite was bustling with activity. The best part of events like the Golden Globes is the chance for me to visit with some of our far-flung friends and people in the film business who share that part of my life but whom I don’t often get to see. Salma Hayek popped by with her dog, Blue, whom she’d been inspired to adopt because of Buttermilk and Shug, and we compared stories about our passion for roses. Salma and I are like sisters and have been even before I played Tina Modotti in Frida, which this amazing woman both starred in and produced. I had been telling her all about my work with PSI, and I had already convinced her to come with me on one of my trips.

  By midafternoon it was time to pile into the limo and head to the Beverly Hilton. Dario looked so handsome in his tuxedo. He is always a good sport about dressing up for these events and facing the banks of cameras with me, and we always take our own pictures before we leave the hotel—the Mamaw and Papaw, I call it, because my grandparents took great snaps on occasions when they dressed up. Awards shows are merely a part of what I do—they certainly don’t represent who I am—but I really enjoy making movies, and red carpet events are now inseparable from the creative part of acting that I love.

  De-Lovely had been released by MGM, which also had a hand in distributing Hotel Rwanda that year, and we were all seated together at the Globes: I was able to spend more time with the terrific Irish director Terry George and with Don Cheadle, who played the hotel manager who sheltered and saved hundreds of Tutsis from the genocide-sweeping Rwanda in 1994. Terry and Don had invited the real manager, Paul Rusesabagina, who was seated at our table, and we visited all evening, mostly about his trip to the States and what an amazing movie had been made from such a painful story. I couldn’t fathom what he had been through during the slaughter, although I could clearly see the weight of it in his eyes and in his posture. He told me that he now lived with his family in Belgium. I wanted to learn more about his life but felt it wasn’t an appropriate setting to ask, so I simply offered him my friendship and told him I hoped I could visit Rwanda someday.

  Wherever I am, I hope to focus completely on the task at hand, banishing any thoughts of the past or the future, engaging fully in the moment. But I was very aware that night that I had a foot in two worlds. Not many of my colleagues knew the first thing about my international work (most still do not!), and it wasn’t something I could casually share with people in that setting: “Hey, tomorrow I’m going to Africa to visit some slums and b
rothels. Would you please pass the champagne?” I was caught up in the paradox of my life, feeling neither here nor there—which is generally a tricky place for me to be.

  The next morning I kissed Dario goodbye and started packing for the trip. Not unexpectedly, some of my old coping behaviors started welling up in the stress and excitement of leaving. I wandered around the large suite in a daze all day, knots of anxiety and jubilation warring in my stomach. I’d cross the room, then retrace my steps because I had “destinesia” (heading somewhere, then forgetting why I’d set out in the first place), or hid some necessary thing from myself, or packed away something I still needed.

  I decided to do myself a favor and attend Seane Corn’s late afternoon yoga class on my way to the airport. I floated through my practice, hearing nothing. I occasionally noticed I was out of sync with the class but kept on following my own breath and trying to open as much as I could, especially my heart. In my back bends, I prayed. Seane likes to walk around the room, softly speaking encouragement or instructions to her students. When I started my finishing poses, Seane sat next to me, and we whispered a little. I told her about my chaotic, weepy day and about how preparing for this trip was different from the time I’d prepared to travel to Cambodia and Thailand. Then I was willing, incredibly willing, but now I was willing and prepared, which brought a prescience of grief.