All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [63]
I wonder what sort of day Ouk Srey Leak has had. I picture her on her nylon mat in the corner, blanketless and pillowless and I worry about a young man I met in his tiny, clean hut, so ill he could not lift his head, his one-armed father peddling herbs to raise capital to buy medicine for his child. I wonder if the other son, the mentally ill one, will ever have any kind of proper mental health care, if he is abused as he wanders around the slums every day. I wonder about all the desperately ill people I met in hospices in both Cambodia and Thailand, and whether they are dead or alive, and if they have passed, did they go gently? I hope so. I hope so.
Oh, this little old house, this humble farmhouse that has held Meacham dreams and sorrows and prayers for so many generations, decade upon decade of supplications for healthy crops and safe children, can you hold my dreams? Can you hold my tears cried again and again for the unsafe children and the sad women I met, and for the millions upon millions I did not?
Much has already come from my trip. We’ve raised almost half our goal monies, Glamour magazine is incorporating fabulously helpful YouthAIDS stuff in my October cover story. Sister is involved, corralling talent for a World AIDS Day concert, and Kate and I are a knockout on the phone together pinning down donors to write those checks.
But for some reason … that’s silly, I know what the reason is … but tonight, as I do many nights, I am suffering. I miss my husband, who is away preparing for a race. I am still carrying a deep cough in my lungs, a holdover from the Myanmar hill tribe kids at the homeless youth shelter. Our cats are deeply in love with me, but rather than enjoying it, it merely highlights how casually they can treat us when we’re away a lot. (Much to my chagrin, Dario does not seem to be relenting on the “No cats on the bus for race weekends” rule.) I am hardly writhing in bed as I did in Bangkok, but the malaise is real.
And so the only thing to do, as ever, is to pray. I’ll listen to the depth of the countryside on this fresh August night, unroll a yoga mat, and take it to the Lord in prayer.
Upon my return, PSI invited me to join its board of directors, an honor I was overjoyed to accept. I would now have a seat at the table among highly qualified public health and technical experts such as Professor Malcolm Potts, a world-renowned reproductive health specialist. I would learn about problems and solutions in greater detail, provide my board cohort with detailed information about our programs on the ground based on ever-increasing personal experience, and help shape the organization’s future. My first order of business was to earnestly advocate diversifying the board in terms of gender, age, race, and geography. Perhaps my proudest moment thus far has been helping to secure an enormous, anonymous donation to provide long-lasting, reversible contraceptives to women in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa. (The program became an unqualified success by 2010, helping to avert three million unintended pregnancies among poor women every year.)
We began planning my trip to Africa as soon as I returned from the Bangkok AIDS conference. We decided to focus on PSI partners in Kenya, Madagascar, and South Africa and the distinct challenges each faced in the fight against HIV/AIDS and other preventable diseases. Because I would be on camera so often on this trip filming a VH1 AIDS documentary and I would also be doing a cover shoot for Condé Nast Traveler in South Africa (another way to promote grassroots work), I decided to invite my longtime friend, gifted painter and makeup artist Moyra Mulholland, to come along. Moyra grew up on a farm in South Africa during apartheid and studied fine arts at