All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [70]
“I don’t let the men touch my breasts, because that’s the food for my baby,” she said. She could not stand to go home to breast-feed with the grime of strange men on her as she held her son.
“What would you do if you weren’t doing this?” I asked. She said she would want a small business, selling secondhand clothes.
Kate looked at me and I looked at Kate, and suddenly all her warnings from Thailand went out the window. We had to help this teenager right away; no NGO programming, however expertly designed and administered, was an immediate enough intervention for Shola. We knew the nature of PSI’s work was not to rescue women out of prostitution, and gestures like these rarely worked without an established support mechanism. For Shola, we made an exception. She was too compellingly tragic. We dug into our pockets and came up with about $250 U.S. It was enough to pay Schola’s rent for two years. We explained how much it was, admonished her to tell no one she had the money, and gave her the number of the local PSI office with the plea to call us to check in, explaining that they could help her convert the dollars to shillings and keep it safe for her. She rolled it up in a tissue and put it in her bra. Our local staffer told her the name of a modeling agency and how to look it up, something that irritated me and I disagreed with but had to admit that in the short term, while she still had no skills, might help her generate income apart from outright sexual exploitation. We gave her a lot of love and encouragement, then drove her to the bus stop.
When I think of Shola and that foul blue room jumps to mind, I blot it out with the memory of her pressed into me, my arms wrapped around her, in the backseat of the car, that ephemeral moment when she was safe, surrounded by people who had rallied to her defense. But it was a brief moment indeed; I never heard whether she followed up with our office, and there was no way to track her down in the transitory vortex of Nairobi’s slums.
In countries like Kenya, where HIV/AIDS, malaria, diarrheal diseases, poverty, and all manner of social problems plague the population, life can be very, very cheap. But the value of a woman in such societies is cheapest of all. That afternoon I had paid 800 shillings for flimsy sunglasses on a Nairobi street; all the women I had met earned 100 shillings for a trick turned on their backs, 200 shillings for one on their hands and knees. Now, that’s cheap.
Back at the hotel, a perky tourist from Texas recognized me in the business center and asked me if I was on safari. I let her blithe obliviousness and her expensive khakis irk me, and I blurted out bitterly, “No. In fact, I am on a HIV/AIDS prevention trip and have just been to three brothels.” I hoped I had ruined her evening.
In the morning, we drove several hours on ridiculously bad roads through the countryside to see a malaria program at a rural clinic. On the way, I received full immersion education about malaria, at that time the world’s biggest killer of children under five.
Because malaria is carried by female mosquitoes that feed on human blood at night, NGOs battle the disease by making it possible for hundreds of millions of people to sleep under nets treated with insect repellent. This works best because entire families often sleep under a single net together, and if it isn’t treated, those whose arms and legs are touching the net will still be bitten unless the repellent is present. The repellent has the added benefit of chasing the mosquitoes out of the room, thereby offering protection to those not under the net almost as well. In this way, multiple huts with long-lasting treated nets in a village can have the wonderful benefit of providing some protection to those who do not yet have nets.
The challenge has been educating folks about the cause of malaria and the need for every household to have and sleep under a net, the distribution of the nets, making