All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [161]
This particular event happened in the Nagar trucking “halt point” outside of Jaipur, on the last leg of our trip through India, and it was the culmination of a remarkable and, for me, life-changing journey that had begun in Mumbai’s Cotton Green terminal.
On any given day, between two and three million long-distance truckers are crisscrossing the giant subcontinent that is India on its thousands and thousands of miles of national highways. At the end of their runs, they park in huge open-air terminals like the one at Cotton Green, often waiting for days while goods arrive and are loaded for the return trip. The trucks are charming works of art, hand-painted with colorful religious symbols, flowers, and adornments that signify their pride of ownership (I took lots of pictures for Dario). Men live, work, and sleep in their trucks and cook underneath them on tiny kerosene stoves. There is a public bathroom block that charges 5 rupees, or you can pee against the wall, as I saw many doing. Otherwise there are no services. Cotton Green is like a mobile village filled with thousands of idle men, which is a recipe for trouble.
Away from their wives, they often go to Kamathipura for sex—or the prostituted women come to them—which puts them at high risk for contracting STIs and HIV and taking the virus and STIs home to their wives. Rural married women are the highest new infection group in India. About three hundred thousand of these long-distance truckers are already living with HIV, making them one of the most critical groups for interventions.
Our outreach program in Cotton Green has been in place since 1998 and was an absolute joy to see. Interpersonal communicators wearing bright yellow coats were stationed intermittently along lines of trucks that stretched as far as the eye could see. One group was staging a very dramatic and loud play, punctuated by an attention-grabbing drumbeat, the plot of which was safe sex. Another group offered a ball toss game (I missed both my tries). The results lead, win or lose, to dialogues about sex: what is safe sex, what kinds of women might be HIV-positive (Any and all, dude! Looking healthy doesn’t mean for sure she’s not! Use protection with each partner!), how does one reduce risk (Well, reducing the number of partners would be great, but that’s a tough long-term sell with these guys), where products and services are available, and the importance and confidentiality of HIV testing.
I meandered from truck to truck. I chatted with hundreds of men, it seemed, and I was followed by more. I called them my “posse.” I sat with them in the dirt under their trucks, where they seek shade from the scorching sun, disregarding the rubbish. We talked about faithfulness, prostitution, and masturbation as an alternative to reduce the number of partners. (Maybe, I was told. But abstaining? No way.) Next we talked about sex with children. I assured them I knew they were good people and that they themselves would not have sex with children, but did they see children in the brothels or know men who did this? Oh, yes and yes, they said.
One new and especially garrulous friend, Yasin, said although he personally would not, he would never tell someone else not to! I challenged that heartily and asked if he, as my friend, would be willing to reconsider. I explained that children were meant to be just that, children, and not to be used for sex by adults, and that it was up to us to stand up for children, who alone were vulnerable and defenseless. We spoke at length, and he said he would share his belief that it in fact was not right the next time he saw or heard of a fellow trucker doing so. He told me how children were pimped and made available and described the little signs used to indicate their availability all along the trucking networks. I told him I had heard. And I looked at him and wondered if he was just