All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [49]
I began to revive during a long drive out through the rural Cambodian countryside. Fresh air, open fields, and gentle farm animals cheered me. The views were lovely, the roads narrow, people few. When we arrived at a wat, or temple, I discovered where a lot of the people were: here, waiting for me! There were village children lining the road, and from a distance the monks in their saffron robes and the white-shirted Buddhist nuns looked like a bouquet of marigolds, dahlias, and zinnias scattered on the pagoda steps.
The polished stone floor was cool on my bare feet as I was led out of the blazing sun and into the quiet corridors of the simple stone building with a soaring roofline. The monks came filing in and greeted me in an extraordinary and happy ceremony that had me lying prone before them as they chanted a blessing on me. We all sat cross-legged on mats; even the shoeless Papa Jack in his safari vest and khakis managed a half lotus. The head monk led his charges through the prayers, their resonant singsong voices sometimes echoed, and always affirmed, by the rows of observers on either side of the Buddha’s sacred alley. At the end the senior monk spoke special blessings and graced me by gently tossing sprays of jasmine blossoms and lotus flowers. Praying? Flowers? It was a dream come true.
As if that weren’t transporting enough, I then went outside, where I was surrounded by the “wat grannies,” a posse of five-foot-nothing, shaved-headed Buddhist nuns, mostly toothless women with brown, weathered faces who pawed me into a state of belovedness. Through my translator they murmured beautiful, hopeful things to me about well-being, long life, responsible and giving nature, and future happiness. I instantly adored them. I soaked them up and kissed them and held them while the most toothless of the bunch cheerfully gummed my arm. I showed them a picture of Dario and told them that I hoped to bring my handsome husband for them to meet someday. They laughed and clucked like happy hens as they passed around fresh coconuts to sip the cool, sweet milk.
The wat grannies are part of a PSI program funded by USAID that pairs vulnerable, at-risk children from the countryside with surrogate grandmothers. The elderly nuns each take five or six children and basically do to them what they did to me: love them. They mentor the children and help educate mothers (if they haven’t migrated to the city for work) about proper child care. Most important, they provide compassion, wisdom, and continuity in a place that is still reeling from the ravages of war and cultural annihilation.
I crossed the yard to a two-walled thatched hut on stilts in which thirty-five women sat with their babies. They were taking a course in mother-child nutrition as well as medically accurate, detailed reproductive health education. I learned that they had never been taught about sex or had any child care instruction before this program. The most schooling any of them had was four years of primary school, so they could barely read. The instructors used colorful, easy-to-identify illustrations to supplement the lessons. Today the women were learning the basics of breast-feeding. Some of the most dynamic of them would be trained as peer leaders, to reach out to those who had not attended the programs—a specialty of PSI and its partners.
When school was over, we had a kaffeeklatsch, hut style. Sisterhood is delicious wherever one finds it. We shot the breeze for more than an hour, sometimes giggling, as the women told me about their lives. When I asked one of them what she called her six-week-old