All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  It was ironic that in the days after such good news about the lawyers’ intervention on behalf of Naina, and the scholarships for my girls, I finally hit the wall. I was so homesick and allowed myself to go through all sorts of petty angers: I resented that I was going to miss the lilacs and the Bradford pears back home. I looked at India’s pollution, the slum visible from my hotel window, and I hated it all. I had been increasingly bothered by what was going on outside of me, unable to withdraw my attention and senses from irritants the way my meditation practice advises. Things clanging, banging, scraping, and slamming in the noisy hotel. It all triggered anger and hopelessness and obsessive worry (“I’ll not be able to sleep, it’s going to wake me up early, I am going to be tired …”), which usually indicated internal anxiety.

  I was weary of working so hard at not letting it rankle me, the noise, pollution, sprawl, pouring my soul out in an honest desire to be useful and ending up on the fashion page (and misquoted to boot), watching smiling girls suddenly go blank when asked what they loved about themselves. I was haunted by Neelam’s neighborhood, the river of sewage, the family living alongside it, the robotic, exhausted man I saw on the sidewalk ironing still-dirty clothes (who for some reason devastated me especially), the three generations of women sitting in the garbage pile sorting trash, saving useful bits for themselves. I was terrified of my own inadequate vocabulary to describe all this, my own bargaining brain that prevented me from truly grasping it all. By processing, I realized I was in a very negative head and heart space about India. I hated its government, policies, and history and the overpowering magnitude of its problems. Yes, many creative grassroots programs work, lives have been touched, but all of the fixes that any NGOs and government programs offer barely touch the tip of the iceberg.

  It was overwhelming. I didn’t want to spend any more time sifting through epic despair to find that one shard of hope. I was done. I just wanted to go home.

  And then I came down with a case of “Delhi belly,” a bout of sickness that nearly rivaled my meltdown in Bangkok. I gave up trying to move or sip even water; everything I did created worsening cramps. Apparently, my body was purging everything I had taken on board. I had to respect its wisdom and accept that for the next little while, I was a passenger.

  My sweet friends sat with me for hours to comfort me. Papa Jack read a recovery text to me while I lay still like a wretch. Seane “niced” me, rubbing little circles on my back, so-called because it feels nice, and listened while I sobbed about that man ironing dirty clothes, whose traumatic image kept returning to my mind. I told them about my transformative (though painful at the time) experiences at Shades of Hope, and soon, through fellowship, the downtime became a blessing.

  I was reminded once again that I could have serenity in spite of circumstances, in spite of people, places, and things. And I also knew that this despair, too, would pass, despite the impression that everything was hopeless and futile.

  I recovered quickly enough to fulfill my obligations in New Delhi and to travel to Jaipur, where Akshay Kumar and I reached out to thousands of truckers with the message of prevention. I was holding it together quite well, in fact, until my very last day in India, when I met a group of homeless children.

  Anubhav is an NGO that rescues homeless boys from the railway station, where children end up after they have been abandoned or orphaned or have escaped from abusive families. The outreach workers try to save the girls, too, but the gangs/pimps/traffickers are too slick and usually nab them first. In fact, the director sadly told me they have never once been able to rescue a girl. The boys, some of them just toddlers, scavenge for food along the tracks that run through the grubbiest, nastiest, most gruesome slum I’ve ever seen. The children look like lunatics with their never brushed hair in wild nests around their grimy faces, standing with shoeless feet on garbage heaps and industrial scrap metal piles. The malnutrition was so bad, their hair was two-toned, orange and dull brown. Their homes were rotting sacks stretched on bricks.

  The organization, which was started by a group of street children—again, the real experts—runs a drop-in center that provides a safe space where the boys can sleep and spend time during the day. It teaches personal hygiene, feeds them, begins literacy training, and offers spiritual direction. They meditate in the mornings, pray before meals. Some of the boys were AIDS orphans, others ran away from abusive homes. I held a ten-year-old and a four-year-old on my lap, darling little things, and we talked about everything under the sun. Both had escaped abuse, preferring the mean streets to the cruelty at home. The older one had been raped about five times. It was unbelievable that he was so honest with me. (I began to realize some of the gender differences within the sexual exploitation of children. Girls are often kept captive and used chronically; boys are used episodically by occasional predators.) I liked it best when we talked about safe touching. I said one should ask first and remember that everyone has the right to say no, and we should each respect another’s “no.” The little one had been taken in by the center within two days of arriving at the rail station. The older one had been addicted to huffing paint fumes, something common among urban, traumatized youth. Often it’s done initially to ward off hunger, but the high also becomes part of the appeal, a way to numb the pain of reality. Amazingly, I could share some simple concepts with him. After we discussed it, he said he believed he was powerless over huffing, that it made his life unmanageable, and that there was a good and loving God, and he could ask his God for help refraining from huffing, one day at a time. (Of course, I don’t think he’ll be permanently fixed, but maybe it’s a tool that will give him relief from time to time.) I asked them if in honor of the special time we spent together they’d look out for one another after I left. Still on my lap, they beamed at each other, squealed “yes!” and showed me how they were going to hug and hold hands.

  I wandered around the neighborhood, going deep into the thicket of provisional dwellings, imagining life here day in and day out. I was sitting in a makeshift shanty, on the bare dirt underneath a scrap of canvas, when I heard a kitten crying plaintively. I panicked. It freaked me out so deeply, I knew I had to flee or I was going to stand up and rip the slum down to find that cat right now now now now, or I was going to freeze and sit there and listen to this little mewling sound and completely lose my mind. I was afraid I was on the verge of going emotionally somewhere far, far away and not coming back. My brain was flooded. Of course, I was transferring the grief of ten thousand and my own triggered, vicarious trauma onto that one kitty cat, and I had just enough sense left to know it. Somehow I stumbled to my feet and started walking away. And then the children of the shelter brought me back to this world. They surrounded me to say goodbye and sent me off with an echoing chant that sounded like bells in the distance:

  Oom shanti shanti shanti … oom shanti shanti shanti …

  In the car, Marshall asked me if the smell of poop had bothered me when the boys were on my lap. “No,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed.

  Mother Teresa of Calcutta, when awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was asked by a journalist what she intended to do with the million-dollar gift.

  “Feed the poor people of India,” she said.

  “You couldn’t possibly!” the journalist cried. “Feeding the poor people of India would cost far more than that!”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But my God simply asks that I try.”

  And so I try, too. Mainly I try to have a little peace inside, which in some measure I can take out into the world with me. God knows the world needs it. I have carefully examined what happened on this trip to India, my attitude and my resentments toward the treatment of the poor. This is what I have chosen to remember in future trips: Accepting something doesn’t mean I have to like it. It simply allows me to accept reality as it actually is this minute, and then move into the solution, rather than obsessing on the problem. Today, I believe we all need solutions, so I choose the process, again and again, of surrendering, acce
pting, suiting up, and showing up … and letting go of the outcome.

  Although sometimes the outcome lifts my heart.

  After I returned home, I was shown a tape of Shahrukh Khan recording a powerful public service announcement for PSI/India. My little orphans Neelam and Komal had been invited to the taping, and they were clearly thrilled to be sitting with the most famous star in India. After he finished, Shahrukh called Neelam to stand beside him and announced that it was his great honor to present her with a scholarship from Ashley Judd and the Rai Foundation that would take care of her education all the way through a master’s degree. As she accepted the certificate, her serious, beautiful, shy face lit up like the rising sun.

  Chapter 20

  THE WHITE FLOWER OF RWANDA

  In the Highlands with my Scottish and Irish heroes, on my fortieth birthday.

  Si tu me connaissais et si tu te connaissais vraiment, tu ne m’aurais pas tue.

  (If you knew me, and if you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.)

  —FELICIE NTAGENGWA

  celebrated my fortieth birthday—April 19, 2008—in the Scottish Highlands with Dario’s family and some dear friends, roaring with laughter, running a sack race, and winning the caber toss on the front lawn of Skibo Castle. Five days later, I was in a hotel room in Kigali, Rwanda, gazing out my window at the African sun setting in dazzling shades of orange and red. My last time on this continent, the original home of us all, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I was nearly distraught. Everything, but everything, provoked a cry: My first African tree! My first African bird! My first African friend! I was returning to my cradle, and everything had the heightened drama of a seeker’s first pilgrimage. This time around, I was grateful to be emotionally sober (not somber—sober includes great mirth). Not that I was casual about this journey; far from it. I was simply … simpler. My gratitude, awe, respect, and even enthusiasm were more nuanced and subtle.

  There was tough work to be done on this trip. Rwanda is the most densely populated African country, with more than ten million people squeezed into an area the size of Maryland. It is also one of the poorest and most traumatized places on earth in the aftermath of a long series of genocides, culminating in the unspeakable genocide in 1994, in which eight hundred thousand people were murdered in the space of one hundred days and millions were driven from their homes. PSI is one of the NGOs that the Rwandan government has invited to help it build a community-based health care system as a foundation to lift its people out of abject poverty. As always, I was here to see our grassroots programs and others’ in action—particularly our child survival initiative called Five & Alive—to celebrate what works and the workers who do it, and to help carry the good news back to donors and policy makers that this remarkable country is lifting itself out of the ashes. For example, Rwanda has been outperforming most African countries in meeting its United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which provide a framework and set targets for poverty alleviation, education, child and maternal health, HIV and other disease eradication, and gender equity.

  But there is no way to begin to understand the depths of Rwanda’s agony, or its soaring promise, without first plunging into the original heart of darkness. The genocide inescapably informs everything in this country and most certainly the public health mission here. It is the background, acknowledged if unspoken; it has set Rwanda’s stage.

  So once again, as I did in Cambodia, I began this journey with a visit to a genocide memorial.

  In an angular, sand-colored building surrounded by gardens and graves, the exhibits are divided into three parts: the roots of the genocide, the events of 1994, and the aftermath. The narrative format is so familiar to me: This is what I was. This is what happened. This is what I am now.

  The first of three chambers was lined with black-and-white photos from Rwanda’s colonial past. First the Germans and then the Belgians claimed authority over this volcanic plateau southwest of Lake Victoria. According to the accompanying text, Rwandans identified themselves among eighteen clans, of which distinctions like Hutu and Tutsi were occupational and not tribal/ethnic at all. The colonists made up that all Tutsis were Nilotic pastoralists and Hutus were Bantu peasant farmers. One of the most enraging images was a 1932 photo of a Belgian priest, for God’s sake, a priest, measuring Rwandans’ heads and categorizing them ethnically for registration cards. Once the massacres began in 1994, these registration cards established the delivery system of death for nearly a million people.

  Set up by the Belgians and the Catholic Church, the Hutu majority took over Rwanda at independence, and some seven hundred thousand Tutsis fled to other countries to escape an eruption of ethnic cleansing that began in 1959. Still, more than a million Tutsi remained in Rwanda, some intermarried, and most lived in peace with their Hutu neighbors. In 1990, a Tutsi rebel army known as the Rwanda Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in order to force power sharing with the Hutu government. After years of fighting, the United Nations brokered a peace accord that would allow the Tutsi diaspora to return and establish a multi-party government. This enraged Hutu nationalists, who viewed the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” A fanatic Hutu propaganda machine had been whipping up paranoia and hatred of the Tutsi and their sympathizers. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down as it was landing in Kigali. Within an hour of the president’s assassination, the army and Interahamwe had set up roadblocks in Kigali, and an orgy of orchestrated mass murder began.

  There is no part of Rwanda that was spared the rampage of génocidaires. Local militias had lists of the names and addresses of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and they hunted them down and killed them with their bare hands in their homes and in places of sanctuary. It was intensely personal murder. The swing of a 50-cent Chinese machete once wasn’t enough; they were hacking and hacking, mutilating, annihilating, burying people alive among the dead, cutting tendons, and coming back later to finish the job.

  Half a million women were raped during the genocide, with men who knew they were HIV-positive taking the lead. Many of the women later died of AIDS—a way of extending the killing spree for years. Children were made to murder their parents (and in the case of boys, rape their mothers and sisters), parents to murder their children, before they themselves were killed. As many as ten thousand people who had flocked to a church outside of Kigali for sanctuary were killed by grenades or hacked to death on once hallowed ground. It is unfathomable, yet it must be fathomed.

  What is just as unbelievable is that the genocide could have been stopped within days with a modest intervention from outside troops. The general leading the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda was begging for assistance, predicting what was coming, and saying how very little he needed to avert the murders. Instead, the UN drew down its forces, and member states refused to intervene in what was insanely branded a “civil war,” even as reports of the massacres were appearing in The New York Times and other world media. An American transport plane arrived early on to evacuate the U.S. embassy personnel; had it been carrying troops, they might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, we—you, me, our government, the world—did nothing.

  The killings stopped only when the Tutsi rebel army, led by Paul Kagame, who is now Rwanda’s president, resumed its invasion and took over the country. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and Interahamwe escaped across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where merciless armed militias are still creating havoc in that war-torn region.

  As I moved slowly through the exhibits, I could feel my legs becoming heavier, almost immobilized. At times I was close to passing out, and I’d have to catch myself up and reconnect with my breath. I would feel pain so deep, the rest of the world ceased to exist and I would be swallowed entirely in it. Prayer did help as I was sucked inexorably further into the memorial. Whenever I started to lose my mind, I would begin to pray for the souls of the dead. May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace. One milli
on and more times, May you rest in peace.

  One of the round rooms of the exhibit had victims’ clothing suspended in midair by filament. The arrangement of the clothes uncannily suggested the posture of the body that had occupied them; the empty garments expressed surprise, violence, pitiful and useless self-defense. The clothes were all sizes, and I stood, weeping and haunted, in front of a child’s colorful sweater, filthy from where the body had lain in the muck. At that little child’s age, that would have been my favorite sweater, it was so cheerful. It reminded me of the rainbow painted on the entrance to the tunnel from Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge, so optimistic! Next to it was a tattered Superman sheet. God have mercy on us all. Was the person sleeping and hacked to death in her bed? Had a wildly panicked mother grabbed the sheet to tie her youngster to her back so she could run from her rapists?

  Another room had horizontal rows of filament to which survivors had pinned photographs of their loved ones. Rows, rows, and rows, images from family parties, official documents, snapshots of reluctant-looking elderly that perhaps an amateur family historian took to have for future generations. The exhibit was almost unbearable. Murder, murder, murder, it silently screams.

  I paused at the memorial guest book. I couldn’t see the page for the tears blearing my sight. What did I say? How did I tell the survivors of such monstrosities anything consoling? How did one apologize to the dead? Feeling useless and incompetent, I wrote, “I am sorry, I am so sorry.”

  Kofi Annan, head of the UN’s peacekeeping forces at the time, and other world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, have offered their apologies for failing to stop the genocide. Clinton says he “did not fully appreciate” the speed and intensity and orchestrated nature of the killings and has called his failure to intervene the greatest regret of his administration. He has been making amends ever since, visiting the country often and committing massive resources from the Clinton Foundation to help bring about Rwanda’s recovery.