by Ashley Judd
First, I just say, “Hi, God.” Second, I declare my proper relationship with my Creator: I am powerless over people, places, and things; there is One who has all power, and that One is a loving God. Third, I recommit myself to the decision I have made to turn my will and my life over to the care of this Power. A hint of Julian of Norwich’s prayer floats to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well …”
Standing on the edge of a creek, my feet yearn, begging me to step in, anticipating the small, smooth stones a thousand shades of sparkling brown, flashing under rushing water. For today, no further thinking is required. My clothes come off. My body shudders a wordless “ah.”
There is nothing like being in a creek, resting on my back, the water parting at the crown of my head, running along my body. I am baptized every time I lay myself out on the currents, my world view turned upside down, dappled sunlight moving between thousands of leaves floating against the sky.
As I gaze upward, I ponder a few things of which to be conscious during an upcoming trip to Africa, a return to the Congo:
~ Expectations are premeditated resentments.
~ Live life on life’s terms. Be a woman among women, one among many.
~ Do the next, good, right, honest thing. Keep it simple. I am responsible for the stitch, not the whole pattern. Turn the outcome over to God.
~ Ask for help. Write Bishop Tutu, Ted, keep in touch with Tennie. Pray. Cry. Get on the yoga mat. Journal. Read the 104th psalm. Listen to gospel bluegrass.
I feel fear. I have been through this before; I call it a “prescience of grief.” It’s that daunted, jittery moment before a huge wave crashes, and I, standing in the powerful ocean staring at the advancing crest, beginning to seriously doubt the wild abandon and love of adventure that put me in the ocean in front of a wave that could snap my neck. But the fear does not stop me, because more powerful is the certain knowledge that I am less of a woman when I ignore the plight of women elsewhere. My life is richer when I chose to align myself with their realities, share their truth, witness their lives, and admit their pain into my soul.
The August full moon has come and gone and I am home once more from Africa. The dogs and I walk in the woods, the creek that runs through our farm calling me. I pick up a green acorn, and think of the ones the squirrels in the Smokys lent me before my trip, the one I placed against my bosom and carried with me, and gave to a child in a slum. Conditions in eastern Congo were even worse than before. I remember traveling across the lakes and over the cruel, dusty roads, visiting forcibly displaced persons camps, and noble clinics inadequately provisioned, working urgently and under duress where girls and women who have survived gang rape sometimes come for treatment. Kika crawled through the bush for a month to reach help. I fell in love with a group of teenage girls at the HEAL Africa clinic in Goma, particularly a thirteen-year-old named Solange. Like the others, she needed surgery to repair the damage her rapists had caused. I remember thinking of Solange and her friends: When they smile, they are fireflies: luminous, magical, just as fleeting.
I nearly lost hope on this trip. The dark night of the soul hit me faster and with more ferocity than ever before. But that is the way it is with Goma. It’s a tough place, perhaps the toughest place I’ve ever been. It challenges the very notion of a loving God. I might even say, Goma defies God. One night in my hotel room, still reeling from the horrors of the day, I wrote an angry letter to God, rejecting the One I had loved in the creeks and woods:
Dear God, These are your children. What is to become of them? Why have you created a world in which you choose to be ‘powerfully powerless?’ I think you and your big plan absolutely suck. I think allowing vulnerable, defenseless children to be gang raped and thrown away, illiterate and unable to prevent and treat disease, is beyond a bad idea. The notion you are a God of justice is a savage lie. I think you’re a cruel charade and that you’re going to be bested by some God who doesn’t let crap like this happen.
I thought about Archbishop Tutu. What would he say about all this? I send him an SOS in an email. A few days later, I received his reply:
God is so glad God has someone like you. Available, impotent, wanting, and willing, bearing an unbearable anguish, crying and offering all that you can, a point of transfiguration, offering, being a conduit of grace, of love, of tears, of impotence, and God will thank you for accepting the foolishness of the Cross, the weakness of the Cross. I love you and pray for you to go on being the caring, feeling, crying, weak centre of goodness in a horrible world …
My prayer was answered, and I remembered that God lives in the space between people, in relationships, is acted out through our interdependence. God had always been with me.
I remember what I believe: God is love, and when I love, God is with me; and, in order to love, I have to have someone to love. And that someone, well, maybe that someone is you, Ouk Srey Leak. And you, Farm Friend. And you, Solange.
As the dogs run ahead, I visit the ironweed, jewelweed, and admire the twining sprawl of passionweed, which looks like a crazy Costa Rican exotic even though it is our state’s wildflower. I kneel when “my” red tail hawk takes flight in front of me, keering. At the creek, I put my feet in the cold water and savor the delicious tingle and relief that swells in my entire body. I will rededicate myself to the Good God who made all this.
I wade a spell, the hem of my knee-length nightgown getting wet. However, I will not take off my gown, I will not swim. I want to keep the Congo on me. I do not want to rinse off where I have been.
I want to remember.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although it is an account of my individual journey, the making of this book in many ways represents a group conscience, the sustained work and suggestions of, in particular, Maryanne Vollers, Trena Keating, and Pamela Cannon. I am deeply indebted to Maryanne’s unflinching, steady hard work, which included becoming intimately acquainted with no less than six hundred fifty pages of diaries I have kept on trips to the global south, plus my other writings (published, unpublished, academic, etc.) and speeches, which she cleverly suggested I incorporate into the diaries in order to tell more of my personal story (which I resisted, but that’s another story, because in the end, here it is). Maryanne also pushed me hard on the structure and sequence of the chapters, and without her, given I was in graduate school and then on two films, this book would remain but a dream. She is scary smart, which is why I liked her in the first place, and I am grateful she wears her intelligence loosely, and never lorded it and her lengthy experience as a war journalist in sub-Saharan Africa over me! Trena had astonishing confidence in my writing and me, believing my diaries had to be published. She gently guided—without ever directing—me toward the right folks. Those ended up being the good people at Ballantine, including Pamela Cannon, whose reputation as a rigorous and hard-nosed editor suited me fine. I wanted to learn, and all three of these women provided outstanding on-the-job training. Thank you so much for every call, email, word of encouragement, and, I might add, extended deadline.
This book has its inception in the experiences of friends and family who read my diaries sent from around the world, beginning in 2002, and gave their feedback and encouragement. Harold Brown, my attorney, firmly maintained there was a book in these writings when such an idea seemed to me far fetched and grandiose; Penny Gummerson said she waited each day for a diary, and at times folded her arms on her desk, laid her head upon them, and wept; Cary Berman said when daily missives arrived, he would close his office door, and read in them in their entirety right away, then help me find work that would pay my bills while I disappeared again into slums and brothels. Cathy Lewis, Ric and Donna Moore, and others like them, sent checks, large and small, to PSI and its partner programs, motivated by the narratives in the diaries. These people are but a few of the scores of my fellow sojourners who, as I endeavored to honor others by witnessing their life experiences, honored mine. And all I do not mention is not
from lack of gratitude but from the tyranny of limited space in which to do so.
I thank Kate Roberts, who invited me to these front lines of hope and has with her perorations encouraged me to keep going; Marshall Stowell, who has given me gentle friendship in the most daunting of settings; and Papa Jack, for expert advance work, safety and protection, intelligence, essential moments of levity, and scouting the least stinky places to pee in ten countries, then tolerating my infernal habit of popping a squat anywhere. And, deepest thanks to my PSI family around the world, past and present, who welcome me to their platforms with generous hospitality in the midst of their heroic work advancing PSI’s public health mission among the most poor and vulnerable. You have generously provided an aspirational idealist with an exquisite education in generosity, passion, and tolerance. Thanks especially to those of you who read this manuscript to confirm its technical veracity, as well as our able president, Karl Hoffman, and Frank Loy, chairman of our board, who insist, however improbably, that I am indeed an asset to this phenomenal agency. And last, but certainly not least, thank you to PSI’s thousands of local field staff who do brave, brilliant, compassionate service work every day of your lives. This book, in many ways, is for you, and it certainly is for those you seek to serve.
Nicholas Kristof sets the platinum standard of comprehensive knowledge about international development, compassion, and incisive, evocative writing. His willingness to provide the foreword for this book is a testimony to his dedication to a world without poverty and not to the quality of my work. I am very grateful for the notes he generously provided, which were as precise and helpful as his legendary New York Times columns.
Equally, I thank the many other extraordinary, innovative, dedicated organizations and their worldwide staffs, who work with urgency and love, doing their part to create peace, safety, equality, and empowerment everywhere. I admire you, and am so grateful you allow me to participate in your work. This is but a partial list, and I regret I cannot include everyone who deserves recognition: The One Campaign to End Poverty, Apne Aap Worldwide, The International Center for Research on Women, Women for Women International, The Enough! Project, Equality Now, Defenders of Wildlife, among others.
I must acknowledge my longtime agent and advocate, Michelle Bohan, who introduced me to Trena Keating, and has graciously abided my retreat from acting, and has unflinchingly supported my various and sundry adventures around the world and in graduate school. Equally, I am so fortunate to have a delightful oxymoron in my life: discreet publicists. Annett Wolf and Cara Trippichio help publicize my work with dignity, and protect my privacy with integrity. Thank you!
Several people who are exceedingly special to me took the time to read portions or all of the manuscript, offering sensitive, nuanced feedback from their deep expertise and souls. Ted Klontz, PhD, Tennie McCarty LCDC, ADC III, CEDC, CAS, Gloria Steinem, Sue Monk Kidd, Carol Lee Flinders, PhD, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I l love each of you, and you have changed my life, especially because your audacious authenticity emboldens my own.
Ted and Tennie, in particular, have given me as an adult what I so often needed as a child, “a good listening to.” Thank you for taking my calls, night and day, and giving me that safe container in which to process, heal, and grow, and the tools that work under all conditions. I hope I can give away to others a modicum of what you have so freely given to me.
My time at the Harvard Kennedy School was enriched by powerful relationships with faculty and students, and supported by a nurturing administration. In particular, I honor and thank Professors Marshall Ganz (my glorious advisor), Bernard Steinberg, Diane Rosenfeld, Martha Chen, and Sofia Gruskin, and Ambassador Swanee Hunt, for not only their devoted scholarship of the highest caliber, but how their work and study is motivated by, and infused with, the unapologetically spiritual belief that every single individual is of infinite worth, and that the base must be empowered. Moral leadership, the role of narrative in building social movements and creating peace, eradicating gender violence, economic empowerment of the poor, health and human rights: I was the luckiest student in the world. In addition to these and many other professors, I am indebted to my classmates: your diversity (my midcareer Masters Public Administration group represented ninety-eight countries), your brilliance, your earnest diligence, your humility in sharing how at times you, too, were overwhelmed by everything going on in that school of copious abundance, and your unabashed belief that we can change the world, all while helping me know that while no one can play my role in the struggle for peace, I never have to fight alone. I especially acknowledge my feminist social justice cohort: You light me up. Whether in the classroom, or in corridors where great moments often spontaneously transpired, during office hours, or off campus for tea or “dinners for seven,” Harvard was a constant source of stimulation, inspiration, reflection, and challenge. Thank you, Professor Volnay Gay, for having suggested the School to me; I never would have dreamt of it for myself.
Thank you to friends such as Michelle McGrath, Bobby Shriver, and Seane Corn, who graciously permitted what should be private elements of our friendship to be published. Such are the hazards of friendship with a famous person, and I appreciate your trust in allowing me to share aspects of our conversations and interactions.
I thank my entire family, living and ancestral, American and Scottish, perhaps most especially my dad, Michael Ciminella. He withstood numerous inquiries from both Maryanne and me that necessarily rehashed the darkest and most painful aspects of our family’s past. His fortitude in repeatedly sharing, devoid of all defensiveness or attempts to duck his former shortcomings, is remarkable. Both my mother and he have given me the gift I have come to believe every child deserves: having her reality and experiences while growing up validated, understanding that a day in the life of a child is very different from a day in the life of an adult. I am profoundly grateful to sit with you today in a circle of unity, forgiveness, empathy, and humor, knowing not just intellectually, but feeling in my heart, that “that was then, this is now.” Or, as Tennie would say, “So what. Now what?” Our “now” is a joy, and I love you both. My joyous affection naturally includes my sister and her beloved children, Elijah and Grace.
As for my husband, Dario Franchitti, simply put: I love and adore you. Always have, always will. As some of our more mischievous friends say, “And there ain’t nothing you can do about it!” I cherish our home, our four-legged family, and our quiet time, which has so often been my port in the storm. For a girl who grew up unsure who her emergency person was, I sure am lucky it became you.
Speaking of home, this inventory must include Jamie Mangrum, our exceptional housekeeper, whom we rather seriously call “the mortar between the bricks.” In a real sense, Jamie, without home, I do fall down, and thus the logic goes, you hold me up. Thank you.
To recovering folks everywhere: Although it has been said, “We are people who would not normally mix,” you are my brothers and sisters. Wherever I go, I know we share the sunlight of the spirit, and I am grateful to trudge this road of happy destiny with you. It is my humble prayer that in some way this book thanks you for carrying the hope of recovery to me, and that it can also carry the message to those who still suffer. If one person who reads this book receives the suggestion that a simple and practical plan of action can lead you to a God of your own understanding, relieve you of the burdens of your past, and help you to live as God intended, precious, empowered, and free, then in my opinion, the book is as successful as Kentucky’s 1996 National Championship team.
And, of course, to the God of my understanding: Thank you for doing for me what I cannot do for myself, and especially for my beloved grandparents and all the animals you have put in my life, Buttmemilk, Shug, Percy, Audrey—goodness, the list is long! They have shown me what you mean by unconditional love, which in some measure, I am thus able to pass on. Oh, how I love you. Thy will be done.
NOTES
The following notes are not meant to be a comp
lete list of the sources consulted in the writing of this book, but rather a guide for further inquiry. Most of the facts and figures have been derived from multiple sources, including original research by Population Services International and reports published by United Nations agencies and the World Bank. In some cases, I have cited the sources for unique or hard-to-come-by facts, and in others, I have added extra clarification. For more information on each country, please see www.unicef.org/infobycountry.
Prologue
1 The residents are mostly women and children: According to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), there are 43.3 million refugees and other forcibly displaced people in the world, and nearly 80 percent of them are women and children. In 2009, fromer president Bill Clinton appointed me to CGI Lead, a group of twenty-five global leaders under the age of forty-five committed to developing innovative solutions to pressing challenges. In September 2010, my cohorts and I announced a Commitment to Action called “Rethink Refugees” to address the refugee crisis, with special emphasis on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It includes an awareness campaign and a pilot initiative that will help thousands of displaced people in Congo by focusing on replicable programs in the areas of economic empowerment, education, and energy. For more information, please see www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/lead/refugees/.
2 Famed human rights activist: I traveled to the eastern Congo with John Prendergast, cofounder of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. For more information about Enough and its campaign against conflict minerals in Congo, please see www.enoughproject.org. Our meeting with President Paul Kagame took place in Kigali, Rwanda, on September 1, 2010. Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo was also in attendance.