All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [73]
By the time Agnes and Faiza said their goodbyes, I was so fired up that it was hard to sleep. I could feel my horizons expanding as I contemplated the network of organizations like Equality Now that I could support. Each was like an instrument in an orchestra that, when played together, made a glorious symphony of hope.
Chapter 10
THE RICE TENTS
Prostituted women testing HIV-negative in Madagascar
There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.
—LEONARD COHEN
fter a week in the sunstruck urban wastelands of Kenya, the lush rain forest of Madagascar was a balm for my eyes and my soul. Kate had arranged a brief respite for us at a lodge on the edge of the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, deep in the eastern mountains of this exotic island nation in the Indian Ocean. My plain wooden bed was under a mosquito net, and my windows and doors opened out into a place rich and lush in life and noise, a jungle filled with colorful birds calling in the trees, eight-foot-tall hibiscus plants rustling in the breeze.
I desperately needed this communion with life, as Nairobi had taken it out of me. I am not an urban person in the best of circumstances, and I’d never been to such a place before, so hard and dirty and tough and desperate. I’d thought everything in the developing world was either like Phnom Penh, basically a large rural town, or Bangkok, modern and muscular with freeways and skyscrapers. I hadn’t known there was such a drastic place with millions of people trapped in slums, barely getting by every day. I had been fully disabused of my romantic notions of Kenya, born of films, books, and tented safari brochures. The Maasai I saw were herding thin cattle on the sides of cratered highways chugging with cars on the verge of collapse. My naïveté made me feel foolish.
All the domestic animals I’d seen in Africa were very thin, and I said a compassion mantra each time I saw some: Om mane peme hung. It was how I could feel somewhat useful in my total uselessness to them, and how I could keep from crying. Our young guide from the lodge had an amber-colored dog named Ginger that he called over to meet me so I could love on her. She was awfully friendly and sweet, and I vowed to provide her some food. Papa Jack told me no matter how much money I gave our guide, the dog would see none of it, so I retrieved my lunch scraps from the bin to feed Ginger and her friends. I got some especially good sugar from a lovely brown male, and it was confirmed yet again: There is nothing like the love of a fine dog.
In the morning, we visited an incredible little animal habitat that had chameleons, lizards, snakes, geckos, and the like. It was fascinating that so many unique species had developed in isolation, 240 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. I ended up wondering: How have these creatures so ingeniously and brilliantly evolved to where even their eyeballs make them blend in safely, and we humans have evolved into an eighteen-year-old girl, eight months pregnant, being bought and sold for sex so she can feed herself?
That afternoon, I clumsily tried to evade Papa Jack for a solo hike and was caught red-handed fetching a map at reception. He was kind enough to go against his own instincts and respect my fanatical need for aloneness, and I gratefully trekked up the rich mountains by myself, where I immediately began to weep. I walked and cried, and nature, as always, was overwhelming enough to absorb my grief and allow me to heal some. After Nairobi, I was starting to feel I could no longer be shocked. I could be touched, I could be moved, I could be distraught, but I couldn’t be shocked—at least not by bad stuff. The worst sights and stories were all different versions of the same tragic tale of poverty, lack of