All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [46]
PSI also helped produce a popular television soap opera ominously titled Punishment of Love, which chronicled a couple’s ongoing saga of unsafe sex and its consequences. PSI supports dozens of “edutainment” projects like this throughout the developing world, reaching hundreds of millions of people with healthy behavior change messages.
Because many of those millions have no access to TV or even radio, the organization sends mobile video units stashed in rugged four-wheel-drive trucks to rural outposts. As evening fell, I had the thrill of adventure in my heart while I accompanied one such tricked-out truck deep into the hinterlands of Cambodia. By the end of this one day, I had already seen and done more in Cambodia than I imagined I would in my lifetime. PSI was giving me a window to the world, through the lens of public health, the building block of a sustainability, and as painful as the glimpse often was, I was also loving every minute of it.
My companions were a dynamic team of gregarious kids, many of them HIV-positive (and breaking considerable social taboos by outing themselves in public). They were experienced, energetic, and determined to improve health outcomes among poor people, and proving it by putting on up to twenty-five shows a month in fields, parks, and villages across Cambodia. Taking this show on the road was no act of whimsy—the journey was arduous and difficult. The peer educators were more than professionals: They sang and acted, entertained and engaged their rapt audience as if their lives and the lives of others, depended on it. And they do. Their presence is a fantastic draw for rural folks, some of whom don’t even have electricity. From the truck they show episodes of the soap opera, and then perform comedy routines and bring up members of the audience to participate in skits that combine medically accurate sex education with good old-fashioned fun.
After I emceed for a while (they don’t necessarily know my specific films, but boy, do they understand “Hollywood star”) I snuck off to a field with tall grass from which I could watch the spectacle from a distance. I sat very still on the ground, aware of where I was on the globe, the night sky looking so different than it does from our back porch. I peered through the dark, rich air around me, gazing toward the cone of light and eruptions of laughter that pulsed from the circled-up crowd. It was quite a sight. Look at me now, Mamaw and Papaw, playing on a summer’s night.
The next morning, we drove to another neighborhood on the edge of the city and squeezed through a narrow dirt lane, arriving at a makeshift school for poor kids and AIDS orphans run by Khemara, our partner NGO. The building was no more than a collection of thin straw walls surrounding a clay tile floor with a few woven mats in the middle. The kids did their darling “Oh, here’s the grown-up we are supposed to charm with our songs” routine, and I was charmed indeed. Then they scattered.
I sat on a mat and waited patiently. Finally, by ones and twos, and then in a swarm, they surrounded me. They had dirty clothes and runny noses, and some of them were visibly malnourished, with the telltale yellow-tinged hair that comes with vitamin deficiency. They were tiny for their age—some of the five- and six-year-olds looked no bigger than toddlers because of stunting—and their eyes were sad beyond their years. Many of the orphans were already