All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [147]
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 were 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