All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  Chapter 17

  OFF THE MAT, INTO THE WORLD

  Receiving a kiss in Daharvi.

  What the eye sees better the heart feels more deeply.

  We not only increase the likelihood of our being moved;

  we also run the risks that being moved entails. Seeing increases

  our vulnerability to being recruited to the welfare of another.

  —ROBERT KEGAN, The Evolving Self

  he cabin was dark on my flight from London to Mumbai, so I tapped out a journal entry in the small cone of light by my window seat. While I envy those who can sleep on airplanes, I do enjoy being alone with my thoughts. Tonight, my thoughts were focused on the mission ahead: It was March 2007, and I was about to embark on a three-week journey through India. It was a dream trip straight out of my childhood imaginings. But rather than focusing on Ayurvedic spas and colorful Hindu temples, I would be zeroed in on the largest slum in Asia and the largest brothel district in India. With more than a billion people, nearly one-third of whom live below the poverty line, $1.25 per day, and an estimated 2.5 million infected with HIV/AIDS, India is the mother ship, the big kahuna, of development challenges and an urgent platform for PSI. The pandemic had already infiltrated the subcontinent among the usual high-risk groups: prostituted and trafficked women, intravenous drug users, truckers, and migrant laborers. Now HIV/AIDS was poised to explode through a region that holds one-fifth of the people on earth. The need for measurable, sustainable, immediate intervention was—and still is—critical.

  The usual team would be meeting me in India, along with a National Geographic crew who would be filming me for an hour-long documentary, India’s Hidden Plague, about how HIV/AIDS is spreading under the cover of secrecy and ignorance. I would also be meeting up with another special traveling buddy, my beloved yoga instructor, Seane Corn, whom I had invited to join PSI as a fellow YouthAIDS ambassador. Seane’s gritty street smarts and boundless compassion made her a perfect companion for an inevitably difficult journey.

  I knew I would witness scenes of devastation, and I would listen to the all-too-familiar, always heart-wrenching stories of abused and abandoned girls and women. But a year had gone by since I’d entered into treatment, and I felt better prepared than ever to take on this work. Did I expect to hurt on this trip? Absolutely. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. But I no longer had to hurt myself. I had recovery. I wrote in my journal: “I am often asked, sometimes quite harshly, why in the world I do this social justice work in squalid places, and I am, by the grace of God, slowly learning that piece of my own story. Simply put, I do it because I love it. But why do I love it? I have always had an absolutely insane sensitivity to sexual exploitation of any kind—overt, covert, institutionalized, spontaneous on the street, humor in movies that is outrageous yet depicted casually like there is nothing wrong with it. It hurts me. I know now that I was abused myself, and of course, it makes so much more sense.…

  “My recovery brings with it healthier boundaries, loving detachment, and the ability to serve for the sake of serving, letting go of the outcomes, not because I am unconsciously wrestling my own unresolved grief. The latter motivation is not a bad thing, not at all. To do this work, it takes what it takes, but I, for one, am glad to know why the orphans and other vulnerable children affect me in a way that before could make me ill for days. Now, when I see lost children, I know that I, an empowered adult, am nurturing and loving my own little lost child in me, and that is such a beautiful thing. We are all one, and I am incredibly moved to live this out, time and again. We are one.”

  My personal goal on this trip was to feel, just once, compassion, tenderness, and—dare I say it?—love for a perpetrator. To see someone who exploits other human beings and to understand completely that the behavior is not the soul. To remember that abused people in turn abuse, that behavior is a perfect reflection of the system in which they live. To truly love just one madam, pimp, or john—even if only for a breath. That is my goal. A goal that requires a Power greater than myself, for sure. So, I prayed:

  God, I am now ready that You may have all of me, good and bad. Please remove every single defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness to You and my fellows. I ask only for knowledge of Your will for me and the power to carry it out. I trust You completely to teach me how to take good care of myself, and I know that You do for me what I cannot do for myself. Thank You for this special adventure.

  And then I could not resist throwing in a small request for myself: “Oh yeah, and I’d really like not to get diarrhea like I did in Thailand, and I’d love to see a pretty temple.”

  I finally dozed off, to dreams of henna tattoos and homespun cloth, of lotus petals borne on sacred rivers.

  The tires bumped and the giant jet shuddered to a halt on the runway at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. As we taxied to the terminal, I saw an entire family near the runway, using pails to pull water out of a filthy ditch, in which the children were also playing. Welcome to India.

  Marshall Stowell and Papa Jack were waiting, as always, to scoop me up at the gate and sweep me into town. With a population of sixteen million, Mumbai is the third-largest city in the world and the most populous in India, which is saying a lot. The scenery along the route to the hotel hummed with vitality and desperation: the monochromatic shanty roofs of Dharavi, a million-person slum where I would spend much of the next week, in the shadow of business towers and shopping malls under construction. There were families living on sidewalks, beggars, some of whom have maimed their children in a desperate attempt to manipulate money from tourists, hundreds of thousands of matching little taxis, all manner of rickshaws, flowing somewhat miraculously in multiple directions at once, accompanied by a giant symphony of horn honking. They do love to lean on their horns in ole Mumbai.

  The Taj Mahal Palace was an oasis amid the chaos, a massive architectural marvel of a grand hotel. My comfortable suite looked out over a motley flotilla of ships bobbing in the Arabian Sea, and I allowed myself to feel for a moment as if I were living out my childhood fantasies of adventure.

  While I took a day to rest, Papa Jack and Marshall went off to scout our locations in and around Mumbai—no mean feat in such a congested and unpredictable environment. By now Papa Jack had become an invaluable asset for PSI, which used his services to advance important trips even when I was not traveling. In fact, he had seen more of our platforms than I. Jack and Marshall had already been in India for days, making sure all the venues I would visit were as safe as possible and the contacts lined up by our local staff were appropriate and reliable. Jack keeps up with U.S. State Department safety bulletins, he trains the drivers in defensive and getaway driving.

  I frankly like the dangerous stuff, the realism and undisguised nature of life as others are living it. I reluctantly accept the security and the help. My husband understandably insists on it, and because I am a kidnapping risk (even though I refuse to see myself that way), PSI and other organizations’ insurance also require it. But I dislike the feeling of being set apart, approaching the reality of daily life differently from the citizens I am there to meet, the humanitarian and aid workers who do not have the benefit of such protection and resources. I enjoy journalists, for example, who can blend in and watch life unfold without the distorting presence of SUVs and “fixers.” Nonetheless, it’s fun traveling with Papa Jack, and reassuring, because of our history, when the going gets weird, which it sometimes does in brothels and seedy neighborhoods. But none of us expected the most dangerous moment of the trip to take place in a movie theater lobby.

  The plan was to showcase a dynamic street theater program that sensitizes Indians to the reality of sex trafficking in their communities, to de-stigmatize and correct myths about women trapped in prostitution, and raise awareness about the public health crisis of HIV among them. In this case, it was the audience at a theater on the edge of Kamathipura, Mumbai’s notorious red-light district. Just as in Southeast Asia an
d Latin America, prostituted women in India have the greatest risk of contracting and spreading HIV. In Mumbai alone there are up to two hundred thousand prostitutes and sex slaves, and anywhere from 18 to 45 percent carry the virus.

  I had spent the previous day absorbing the lay of the land in Kamathipura. The brothels were so much like those in Svay Pak, Antananarivo, Nairobi—except they were even more crowded and filthy. Some were no more than rickety rabbit warrens stacked on top of one another, attached by ladders and narrow corridors. Women lived and worked in bunks four or more to a room; their children running around or hiding under beds amid their scant possessions while their mothers serviced customers. It was hell. Each brothel building block had electricity and running water for only two hours a day. The women explained that they had to queue with their small pails at the one spigot in advance of the water’s flow, or else they might go without water for days. They said they try to help one another out: If one had a client—and oh, how precious those terrible rupees are—they would try to fill one another’s pails, although brothels, like prisons, can have personality conflicts and cliques, and sometimes arguments broke out over scarce resources.

  The women we met were aware of the HIV/AIDS crisis but were often too poor and powerless to protect themselves. If a trick would pay extra not to use a condom, and the woman and her children were starving, who could fault her for conceding? It was clearer to me every time I visited prostituted women that the key to stopping the spread of HIV is changing the behavior of the men who exploited them for sex (also known as “demand abolition”), which, logically, would be accompanied by the ultimate goal: a reduction, and eventual eradication of sexual exploitation.

  So here we were at the Royal Cinema, where a troupe of interpersonal communicators regularly interrupted the shows—there’s always a pause to change reels anyway—with lively skits and demonstrations of the importance of male condom use and other behavior change scenarios. Today’s was especially powerful, as women from the brothels boldly stood on a public stage, performing vignettes that showed hundreds of people what daily life was like for them. In one, a woman presented her ID card to the ration office for her measure of kerosene, but the bureaucrat, knowing she was a prostitute, discriminated against her, denying her rations. In another, a customer bullied a woman into unprotected sex. In yet another, a pimp took all of a woman’s earnings, then beat her to “teach her a lesson.” A troublingly common example of generational discrimination was shown, too, in a girl being sent home from school, scorned and denied access because her mother was a prostitute. Without school, the girl’s own future as a prostitute is almost a given; a life of penury is indeed certain. And no representation would be complete without depicting police extorting sex for free.

  The Mumbai media had been invited to this Saturday afternoon event, which we expected to be followed by a fairly low-key Q&A with me about PSI’s mission. Nobody had anticipated the hundreds of reporters, photographers, camera crews, and assorted gawkers who crammed into the theater lobby. While Papa Jack and his security team tried to push back the shouting paparazzi, I huddled in a corner with a beautiful old woman with bad knees and no shoes. She stood creakily, the smells of her unwashed body pronounced, and raised her hands to bless me; I made myself lower than she. She placed her hands in prayer on my head. I reached down to touch her feet. She might have been Jesus Christ himself, but I never had the chance to find out because the mob grew more unruly and were starting to crush us against the wall. Suddenly I felt Papa Jack’s strong arm around my shoulders as he and Marshall pushed me through the crowd like a flying wedge of blockers hurtling toward a touchdown. The goal, in this case, was a van that had been backed up to a side door. We were soon inside and pulling away from the silly melee.

  I was a little shaky from adrenaline, but I didn’t want to waste the rest of the afternoon, so we decided to take a quick side trip to a site I’d long wanted to see: the Gandhi House and Museum. What better way to come down from a narrow escape than to pause to honor the champion of peaceful resistance?

  Well, the paparazzi had caught wind of our change in plans, and they were waiting in throngs outside the museum. Marshall bargained with them: Taking a cue from my experience with pesky lookie-loos while filming movie scenes outdoors—a problem I had encountered especially in New York City on Someone Like You, when paparazzi actually interfered with our shooting until they were granted snapshots—he told them I would give a quick photo op and say a few words if they would agree to leave me alone to tour the house. To their credit, unlike American paparazzi, they kept their end of the agreement and allowed me to have my sacred moment in Gandhi’s home in peace.

  The tranquility inside the three-story colonial-era building was palpable and holy. It had been Gandhi’s home in the city between the years of 1917 and 1934, when Mumbai was known as Bombay and Gandhi was organizing the satyagrahas and acts of peaceful disobedience that would eventually bring down British domination of India. After Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, the house was preserved as a museum and turned into a center for Gandhian studies. I read every plaque, studied every picture on the walls. It made such an impression on me: this mighty, humble man, wearing peasant’s attire and sandals in the wet and cold, carrying in his arms all he owned at the time, moving nations. I spent some quiet time in front of the plain, thin pallet where he slept, in a room still neatly arranged with his simple possessions, including a spinning wheel. I imagined his hand on his walking staff and was moved by the crude mug from which he drank. It was wonderful.

  Of his many, many inspired teachings, perhaps I love best that he said, “I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a Christian and a Jew!” I am a devout follower of his teachings and believe without reservation that nonviolence is the way toward peace. And as I prepared myself for a week in multiple red-light districts and in the vastly sprawling slum of Dharavi, I meditated on Gandhi’s unequivocal assertion that poverty is the worst form of violence.

  To that end, I was working to help reach the poorest and most exploited for an immediate health intervention at the most basic level. In addition to helping India curb its HIV emergency, preventing unintended pregnancy is a deeply moral issue with profound implications. While we cannot change the living status of these vast numbers of poor overnight, we can help women not have more babies that bind them further to destitution and condemn the infants to needless suffering, to powerlessness, to pimps and madams. We also have programs for malaria prevention, safe drinking water, micronutrient delivery, child survival. But perhaps most exciting for me to see was the Sanghamitra women’s collective, a partner that uses Gandhian principles of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and unified action to empower prostituted women, perhaps the most destitute and oppressed population in all of India.

  Sanghamitra is the brainchild of Dr. Shilpa Merchant, who at the time was state director of PSI. The prostituted women who founded Sanghamitra named it after a great mythical figure, the wise daughter of Emperor Asoka, who transformed her father from a ruthless tyrant to a peaceful follower of Buddhism. The work of the collective is likewise transformative, turning once isolated, disempowered women into a sisterhood where they can help one another as they learn how to advocate for their own human and social rights. Their motto? “In Unity There Is Strength.” Members of the collective and their children are provided a place, called a drop-in center, in the heart of the Kamathipura red-light district to rest and relax away from their swarming brothels. They learn to develop strong women-to-women alliances and to rely on one another in times of need. PSI supplies the women with male and female condoms, and Sanghamitra peers offer instruction in how to use them to avoid HIV, along with lessons in reproductive health and birth spacing. Importantly, the facility offers various recreational and vocational skills such as sewing. Sanghamitra also reaches out to law enforcement to maintain crucial, positive relations with the police. But to me the most exciting outgrowth of Sanghamitra is the Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank, which offers its
members (currently about three thousand in all) a chance for economic freedom.

  Prostituted women are caught in cunning cycles of vicious debt—to the people who own them, the madams who run the brothels, and then the moneylenders who scam the women with high interest rates when they have emergencies and no other source of credit. The deal is so stacked against them, and they suffer, their children suffer, and the families they are supporting back home suffer. To break that cycle, PSI/India helped set up a lending and borrowing system, following the revolutionary approach of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (founded by Ela Bhatt), that puts what the prostituted woman earns under her own control for the first time. Sangini means “friend,” and the revolutionary new system is run by the women, for brothel-trapped women.

  I sat in rapt attention as a lovely young man gave a PowerPoint presentation about how this particular microfinance and credit and savings program works. To begin, Sangini creates a photo ID for each woman so she can open an account. Lack of proper identification is a huge barrier to banking (and a significant means of discrimination) for women who have been either trafficked, tricked into prostitution, shunned by their families, or born into such poverty that they don’t even possess birth certificates. The only requirement for a Sangini bank ID is membership in Sanghamitra. Every day, someone from the bank visits each brothel to pick up deposits, even if it is only 10 rupees (less than 25 cents). While there, the representative counsels the women about the importance of savings and encourages them to set goals: their children’s education, for example. The member may withdraw her money at any time, in any amount, without penalty; while deposited, it earns a healthy, fair interest. And she can apply for small loans for emergencies or perhaps to start her own business. It’s simply the neatest operation. They have outfoxed the cheaters and owners at every move. In its first year of operation, the bank took in more than 2 million rupees in deposits from seventeen hundred account holders in Kamathipura. Sangini, and initiatives like it, has awesome potential to serve as a model to benefit once hopelessly poor women everywhere. Economic empowerment is an essential piece in the complex puzzle of disentangling women from exploitation. Rock on, Sangini!