All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [37]
I sat down and called Bobby to say, “I’m in.” I wrote to Kate Roberts and told her I was ready to discuss becoming the global ambassador for YouthAIDS. I agreed to meet her in Chicago on the third day of the tour. I felt in my soul that I was finally about to realize my true vocation, and I rejoiced. I knew my life was changing. It was exciting, and daunting, too.
We started out from Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 1, World AIDS Day. The eleven-city tour would take us across Iowa and Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Bono, Bobby, and Jamie Drummond, DATA’s chairman and chief organizer, chose to bypass the media-rich, oh-so-sophisticated East Coast and West Coast and focus on the interior, because, as Bono explained, it’s a place of strong communities and families, where the nation’s “moral compass resides.” He told one newspaper reporter, “We came to the heartland to get at the hearts and minds of America.” The plan was to engage people where they worshipped and where they lived, to dispel some of the myths about Africa as a vast, dysfunctional wasteland, and to put a human face on the AIDS catastrophe. We wanted to reach out to unlikely allies, such as blue-collar workers, evangelical Christians, small-town mayors, and regional newspapers, because we believed they would warm to the cause once they understood the depth of the crisis and knew that they could make a difference. As I often said, “It took an Irishman to remind me of President Harry Truman’s quote, that if you give Americans the facts, they’ll do the right thing.”
My job on the “Heart of America” tour was to emcee the events, articulate the problems that needed fixing, recite the grim statistics, and begin to address the issue of faith as the basis for this cri de coeur. I would also engage the crowds and make them comfortable with my good old American self before turning them over to the electrifying, hyperverbal Irish rock star who simply blew people’s minds as he exhorted them to greatness.
“This isn’t about charity, it’s about justice!” Bono would say as he took the stage. “We can’t fix every problem, but we must fix the ones we can!” He would take out his guitar and experiment with a song the band was thinking about playing at the Super Bowl, thrilling people with this privileged peek at U2 music in the making. By letting us into his world and opening his heart, he made every one of us want to be better.
There were also appearances by other celebrities and notables, such as Lance Armstrong; Chris Tucker; the famous epidemiologist from Harvard, Dr. Jim Kim (now president of Dartmouth College); nutrition expert Dr. Dean Ornish; and even Nebraskan multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett. Our traveling road show included speakers and performances by the Gateway Ambassadors, a mesmerizing Ghanaian children’s choir, some of them HIV-positive, with whom we prayed as a group before each rally. But we were all very clear that each evening centered on the testimony of Agnes Nyamayarwo, a Ugandan nurse whom Bono had met on a recent trip to Africa. It was her first time in America. Agnes’s story is devastating. She was a devout Catholic who’d had ten children with her husband, an American-trained agronomist. But her husband died of AIDS in 1992, having been infected outside their marriage, and she was left a single mother infected with HIV. In a sadly common African irony, she continued to work as a nurse, caring for others, while she herself had no medications for her HIV-positive status. Her eldest son, Charles, was so stigmatized by his father’s disease that he disappeared from boarding school and was never heard from again. This was perhaps the hardest part of her story to share each evening: not knowing where her