by Ashley Judd
“Where did their son live?” he asked.
When he was told it was Atlanta, a chill ran down his spine, followed by a huge wave of emotion. He had been friends with a striking, witty Guatemalan designer named Luis Garcia who had died of AIDS during that time. Marshall was able to assure the family that he had known their son well and that we would be very respectful in the filming. They agreed to appear on camera.
The Garcias’ house was in one of Guatemala City’s wealthiest neighborhoods, where stately homes are hidden behind high stone walls covered with fragrant, blooming vines and metal security gates. Luis’s grown brothers and sisters were there to greet us, along with his parents, a handsome middle-aged couple with traces of pain still etched in their faces. Blanca Garcia sat snuggled with Salma and me on the couch in the cool, spacious living room as she paged through a thick album of photographs commemorating her son’s short life. We all teared up when Blanca told us she had brought the album to Atlanta to reminisce with Luis as he lay dying and to reassure him that he would always be remembered.
Because the stigma against homosexuality and AIDS is so great in Guatemala, stories like Luis’s are usually covered up. But the Garcias chose to honor their son by acknowledging the reality of his life at his funeral, wearing the red ribbon symbol of AIDS. This shocked their social circle, some of whom shunned them for a time. They then boldly went further, opening two clinics to care for AIDS patients and offer counseling services for the families.
As Marshall watched the taping from a quiet corner of the room, he felt a moment of completion, of healing. By helping tell the Garcias’ story, he was offering hope to those who suffer in silence and was spreading the message of prevention that could save more young people from early death. For Marshall, it was something close to grace.
Salma had listened to me talking about my visits to brothels for years; now she would see one for herself. The barrio was called La Linea, a sad neighborhood of garishly painted one-story concrete buildings lining a defunct rail bed strewn with debris. As we walked down the tracks, women peered at us from doorways that led to small cinder-block rooms with narrow beds and sometimes turned to wag their rear ends at us, a form of hello they use to solicit customers. Although prostitution is carried out openly in Guatemala City, many were still afraid to be seen with us. One of the few who would speak to us was Brenda, a teen with long shiny black hair and bright red lips, dressed for business in a tight pink chiffon bodysuit and platform heels. Again, Salma was a natural in this setting. She plunked herself right down next to Brenda on the bed, a thin mattress on creaky springs with one sheet where she had cheap, paid sex, putting her at ease with her warmth and directness.
“Are you afraid of catching HIV?” she asked in Spanish. Yes, said Brenda, but she knew to use condoms, she could insist on it. She also knew how to inspect a customer’s genitals for external indications of STIs. Salma picked up a handful of unopened condom strips that were scattered on the bedspread and asked, “How much do you pay for these?” They were given out free at the health clinic, said Brenda. I was more interested in why Brenda had become a prostitute. The answer was all too familiar: She needed the money to feed her son. There was no other work. She had no education or vocational skills. To provide for him, she sold herself ten or a dozen times a day for the equivalent of $2 a client. (This seemed to be a worldwide price point for exploitive sex.) We made our way down the street, knocking on doors and talking to the women. It was a depressing scene, as always, but with my friend by my side it was not so heavy. In fact, Salma was glowing as we drove out of the barrio, leaning through the open window, waving to the women, and shouting, “Adios, hermanas! Goodbye, my sisters!”
Marshall was intrigued and asked her how it went.
“Oh, it was fantastic,” she said. “These women are incredible, so strong.”
“And what did you talk about?”
“Well, I asked one of them, ‘Do your children know what you do?’ ” said Salma. “And she says to me, ‘No, I tell them that I sell underwear.’ I say, ‘Why would you tell them that?’ She says ‘You know, it’s kind of close to the truth … because the panties are close to the cootchie.’ ” Peals of laughter. I could see Papa Jack’s ears turning red as he sat in the front seat, trying to keep his eyes on the crowd and the police escort leading us back to La Terminal.
Passing defunct cars riddled with bullet holes, we pulled up in front of a stark building and entered a large warehouse space where dozens of prostitutes were playing games with U.S. taxpayers’ money. At least that’s the way Republican senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma tried to characterize one of PSI’s most successful education programs in a letter to President Bush in 2005. “The project which has been funding these prostitute parties is up for renewal,” Coburn wrote. “There is something seriously askew at USAID when the agency’s response to a dehumanizing and abusive practice that exploits women and young girls is parties and games.” I wholeheartedly agree that prostitution is dehumanizing and abusive. It is gender violence. That is where our agreement ends and the senator’s grave shortsightedness begins. PSI’s initiatives, which are often funded by USAID, do not always represent the social ideal, which is that someday all girls and women will have sufficient education, empowerment, and opportunity to support themselves with dignity, free from violence. In the meantime, while we work toward that dream, the health needs of exploited populations should be addressed. Otherwise we are complicit in their abuse and misery.
What Coburn—who is a doctor, no less!—specifically objected to is a bingolike game called La Lotería, in which prostituted women are given cards with a grid of symbols that represent concepts about their bodies, HIV prevention, and pictures of venereal infections. Peer educators hold up the pictures one by one, explaining how to recognize the symptoms of AIDS and other infections and how to prevent them. The players check to see if they have a match. The first to cover all nine squares with tokens wins a small prize, such as a T-shirt or a strip of condoms. La Lotería and other approaches like it convey serious, essential information in a lighthearted, understandable, and practical format for the undereducated and illiterate. Life is hard enough, and studies show that instruction in these settings is not effective when it is grim and heavy-handed. Plus, one study showed that those who had participated in the program reported 96 percent condom use versus 78 percent for nonparticipants. USAID cut off funding anyway.
I had made that spur-of-the-moment trip to El Salvador the previous November to lobby for this aspect of our programming at a regional AIDS conference. Our efforts there and in Washington persuaded USAID to renew funding for La Lotería throughout Latin America, including the sessions taking place in this crumbling building.
Salma and I took seats at a table with about twenty prostituted women from the rough red-light district who come together for a few moments of relief and fellowship. In addition to La Lotería, they played a game that involved rolling dice and moving around a ragged game board, asking and answering questions about reproductive health. I’m a fanatic about any kind of board game, and Salma and I dove right in and rather hijacked the play, competing to win. Before long, our new friends were telling us the now familiar stories about how the ubiquitous circumstances of extreme poverty, lack of education, and gender inequality had put them on their backs and knees. When I asked them about their dreams, one immediately said she wanted to be a mechanic. Many wanted to have jobs sewing. So much for Senator Coburn’s delusion of carefree “partying prostitutes.” But in spite of the grimmest lives imaginable, they had retained their sense of humor, were outspoken, and had managed to find sisterhood and camaraderie in their ranks.
After a bloody early flight to Managua, during which Salma let me go through her purse, a quirky thing I find really soothing (I do that to my mother and Moyra, too, and it works great at Kentucky basketball games that become too exciting), we cleaned up superfast at our hotel to turn around for a meeting with the president of Nicaragua. We wer
e met by the head of protocol at the National Palace, who escorted us to President Enrique Bolaños’s office, which overlooked a humongous volcanic lake stretching for miles to the hazy horizon.
I was pleased to see that many of Bolaños’s ministers were in attendance, which underscored Nicaragua’s proactive and bold attack on HIV. Although the country is desperately poor, they have the lowest seroprevalence in Central America—less than .2 percent—and seemed determined to keep it that way. Kate, Salma, and I spoke at length with the president, a courtly, white-haired gentleman, about PSI programs and how they impact citizens exponentially when governments cooperate in serving vulnerable and at-risk populations. The government was just inaugurating a five-year strategic plan to step up its response to AIDS in the health care sector and to coordinate programs such as HIV and tuberculosis prevention as a smarter and more efficient use of scarce resources. After we signed a declaration formally and publicly enshrining the administration’s seriousness on the issue, the conversation drifted to more light-hearted topics, such as baseball—a huge sport in this part of the world. I used the opportunity to tell the president about the YouthAIDS mission and how in particular we used local stars from sports, music, film, and television to send out positive, upbeat messages about behavior change and empowered gender dynamics. In fact, our itinerary included a visit to the studios of one of Central America’s most popular TV shows, produced in Managua, where we would join the cast to film a public service announcement.
The meeting with President Bolaños was a huge success, as serious as the meeting with Guatemala’s president Oscar Berger had been farcical. Next, I was eager to put my feet down on Nicaraguan soil and absorb the history of tragedy and redemption that has marked this country’s path into the twenty-first century.
This was a big visit for me, because I came of age politically in the late 1980s, when the end stages of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution were playing out. And now I had a chance to walk around and breathe the air at the epicenter of the Sandinista revolt.
While they were in power during the 1980s, the Sandinistas began a countrywide literacy campaign, expanded education, and implemented universal health care programs. In spite of its formidable obstacles, the country still displays benefits from those wise social policies—particularly in the area of HIV education and prevention. For example, prostituted women here have the lowest HIV rates and highest condom compliance in the region. And during our visit we were able to see a remarkable program that educates local and national police about reproductive health. Salma and I witnessed a typical peer education session in which police cadets played their own version of La Lotería. There were quite a few women cadets, just as there had been several women involved in our meeting with the president.
It was heartening to see uniformed service members take their first, baby steps toward gender equality. Men in uniform constitute a cohort that is well known for reinforcing unhelpful notions of what it means to be a man. I believe that it is as equally abusive to men as it is to girls and women to constrain and confine them to behavior and roles dictated by social constructions of gender. I was reminded of the old feminist saw, “For every girl who wants to play football there’s a boy who wants an Easy-Bake oven.” In Nicaragua, women could join the police and win presidential elections, but I wondered if men and boys would ever be able to break out of their traditional roles of hypermasculinity in the new Nicaragua.
After years of strife, the country still has a long way to go to realize the open, equal society that seemed so deliciously possible in the early days of the revolution. Human rights abuses have occurred across the political spectrum, there have been reports of corruption, not all of the government’s policies have been beneficial to the people it serves, and patriarchal values still dominate norms. Teen pregnancy is shockingly common, and motherhood, even for girls as young as twelve, is considered the feminine ideal. An equally disappointing development in Nicaragua was a draconian law passed by the national assembly just months after my visit that criminalizes all abortions, even to save the life of the mother. Because of this cruel law, there have been widespread reports of doctors refusing to treat pregnant women with life-threatening complications for fear of being prosecuted if the fetus dies. According to Human Rights Watch, politicians pushed through the law to gain political support from the Catholic Church, which maintains a rock-hard line against all abortion and contraception.
But I was able attend a Catholic mass in Managua that showed another side of the Church, one that embraces the social justice gospel of Jesus known as “liberation theology.” The congregation met in a broad, airy, simple room, filled with a few dozen kids from PSI/Nicaragua’s youth groups, many of whom were HIV-positive. The service reminded me of the Pentecostal churches I so loved at home: charismatic, with joyous singing and clapping and participation from the congregation. Hymns lifted up the little person, the disenfranchised person, who maybe is sleeping on a park bench, or is selling used shoes from a wheelbarrow, or is being beaten by her husband. The songs said that Jesus was coming for that person. I was rapt. When the priest brought me up to speak—a feature of these modern masses—I shared from the pulpit that even though they might regard their church as modest and humble, for me it was awesome (in the true sense of the word). Jesus has always been my favorite radical, and my life is infused with the values they celebrated; in fact, my Christian faith demands I work for social justice and human rights. I still consider that mass one of the highlights of all my work abroad.
Way too early one morning, Salma and I visited the set of Sexto Sentido (Sixth Sense), a hugely popular television social soap opera that creates thirty episodes a year. The studio was a poured-concrete building, very tidy, the interior walls lined with small painted sets built for each character. They had craft services and were especially proud of their modern air-conditioning. The dressing room was equally neat and shared by the entire large cast. It was a cheerful, sweet experience.
Each of Sexto Sentido’s intense story lines revolve around social issues. There is a gay male couple, a girl who has been sexually abused, a hero character who becomes HIV-positive, a virgin who is betrayed after marriage, and more. The stories are forthright and dynamic, and they present both real problems and real solutions, along with dispensing medically accurate reproductive health information. We were there to make cameos and film a public service announcement about HIV prevention. They filmed a bit of an episode, and after the director yelled, “Cut!” (a woman director, unusual even in Hollywood) the camera pulled back to reveal Salma and me sitting with her at the monitor. We then addressed the cameras, trading lines in Spanish, saying that it’s a lot easier to talk about safe sex on TV than it is to practice it consistently in real life, but it’s critically important. The only bad part of the morning was seeing my tired face and that one huge pimple in such close shots on TV and wincing every time I flubbed an especially hard word in Spanish.
I speak Spanish fairly well, and pick up momentum after a few days’ practice, but for some reason I kept tripping over the same words on every take. It was embarrassing to hear the director yell, “Otra vez! Again!” over and over. There was a time when I might have been flustered, but the new tools of my recovery helped keep me from overreacting. It was a perfectly imperfect performance. I remembered I could make a mistake without being a mistake, and we all had a good laugh when it was over.
Back at the hotel, Salma and I sat out by the pool in the tropical evening air and rehashed the journey we had taken together (which, as with all my trips, was far more extensive than the space here allows me to describe). It’s so interesting how we each have our own deeply private responses to the beautiful people we meet, the incredible things we see. We compared notes about a stop we made at a drop-in center that offered vocational training to homeless kids as well as those who passed their days on the streets hawking to tourists. I made a small friend who was on my lap or held my hand the entire visit, even when I had my ha
ir braided. He made beautiful, intricate figurines from banana leaves, which he sold at intersections to support himself. He was no more than nine. I was torn up by the pathos of his resiliency. For Salma, the breaking point was witnessing the innocent, creative expression of children in such desperate circumstances. Watching the little ones dancing, twirling with joy, that’s when she went to pieces. She continued to teach me about admiring the positive even in abysmal situations.
The next morning I would be off to Honduras, to visit grassroots programs in a community of Garifunas, or Black Caribs, where adult seroprevalence was a shocking 8.4 percent. It would be another movable pageant of tragedy, resilience, and hope, and it was a shame that Salma had to return to Los Angeles and wouldn’t be coming along for the ride.
“You’re gonna miss me, you know!” said Salma, reading my thoughts. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”
Initially, Salma had expressed some trepidation about whether she had the knowledge and skills required on a trip like this one. I told her how impressed I was with her instant grasp of the concepts and her virtuoso performance in the field. All it really requires is humanity, I said, and she had that in spades. “You have, like, a PhD in humanity,” I said. “You are totally qualified.”
“Did I pass my test?”
Yes, Salma more than passed the test.