All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [41]
The Kingdom of Cambodia is about the size of Missouri, squeezed like an orange between the Gulf of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Once the seat of the ancient Khmer Empire, Cambodia was subsequently colonized by the French, bombed by the Americans, and savaged by a genocidal dictator named Pol Pot and his psychotic Khmer Rouge, until finally returning to self-rule as a constitutional monarchy in 1993. It was then PSI set up its first office in Phnom Penh.
By that time the AIDS epidemic had slipped across Cambodia’s strife-torn borders and taken hold in the brothels of Phnom Penh and other population centers. PSI found partners in government agencies, local nonprofits, and private industry to help prevent the epidemic from leaping into the general population. PSI subsidized the manufacture of “Number One” condoms and marketed them specifically for this high-risk group. They showered the brothels with condoms. The campaign seemed to be a big success in reducing infection rates. By 2002, a World Health Organization survey showed HIV rates declining in Cambodia, while the exploitative sex industry accounted for only 21 percent of new HIV infections, down from 80 to 90 percent when the program began. But Cambodia still had the highest percentage of HIV seroprevalence in Southeast Asia. And AIDS was still little understood among the country’s fourteen million people, 70 percent of whom live on subsistence farms.
My itinerary was filled with visits to brothels and orphanages, meetings with government officials, and a trip deep into the countryside to visit a program run by Buddhist nuns. My job was to learn intensively about HIV, other preventable diseases, and effective grassroots remedies and not just share this information with the media, but also receive the sacred narratives of affected people and share those narratives with the world.
Because all lives in Cambodia have been touched by the genocide, I had to confront the trauma and loss that still shapes the Cambodian experience; I spent my first morning in Cambodia at the national genocide museum. In the van with Kate and Papa Jack, I looked intently out the window on this fascinating new world as we crawled through traffic until we reached a stark three-story building near the center of the city. Tuol Sleng prison was an ordinary high school before Pol Pot converted it into a torture chamber. It has been preserved as it was during the actual rule of terror and now stands as a monument to lacerating human cruelty—austere, chilling, cautionary. I felt I could sense evil in the dank air; the dark bloodstains on the concrete floors knocked the wind out of me. As many as twenty thousand prisoners passed through these corridors between 1975 and 1979: students, doctors, innocent shopkeepers who were brutalized until they “confessed” to being enemies of the Communist regime. They were forced to name others before they were executed, and those they implicated were also arrested, tortured, and killed. Those who weren’t arrested were driven out of the cities and towns and rounded up in forced-labor reeducation camps. The country’s infrastructure was devastated in every conceivable way. The social fabric was destroyed. Even the monks were slaughtered. At least 1.7 million people were murdered in the Cambodian genocide, about a fifth of the population, including nearly every person with any form of higher education. Was I absent during the six weeks this