All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [75]
While we waited for Tim to work his magic, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the clinic run by one of the many unsung heroes in the fight against HIV/AIDS, Dr. Rene Randrianga. Dr. Rene is a large man with skin the color of milk chocolate, wide cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes that reflect the mélange of African and Asian ethnicities that make up the Malagasy people. Toss in the French language inherited from the island’s former colonizers, and the mix is complete. For ten years, Dr. Rene has provided health care and counseling to the capital’s prostituted women in an effort to keep them from contracting and spreading HIV. Two factors complicate the danger here: Many Malagasy consider it perfectly normal to have multiple sex partners, in or out of marriage. And this country has one of the world’s highest rates of sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis, and the open sores from these infections facilitate HIV transmission. The best solution available was education and condoms—and PSI was providing both. Dr. Rene would be our guide into the streets of Antananarivo, where—to make a terrible joke—the rubber literally meets the road.
That night, the skies opened up like spigots as we drove down dark, sloppy clay roads lined with tiny, ramshackle shacks until we arrived at our destination. As far as I could see, sidewalks were lined with pathetic tarps made from plastic rice sacks—they called them “rice tents”—where the poorest and most desperate women would lie down on the pavement with johns for as little as 15 cents a trick. That thing I was saying that I couldn’t be shocked anymore? Ha! This scene was unimaginable. I saw a man holding an infant in the rain as he supervised his wife, a prostitute, with a client in a nearby rice tent.
I got out of the car and from beneath a leaky umbrella called out, “Bonsoir!” as cheerfully as I could.
Dr. Rene’s smiling round face emerged from the waiting crowd. “Bonsoir!” he said. “And here are the girls!”
We had arranged a dry place to meet and talk. The women were so poor that no individual could afford to rent a room or even the dollar it cost to buy the sheets of plastic to cover the sidewalks where they worked. So two, three, or more went in together. That type of clustering was apparent as they swirled around me in pairs and threes to be introduced. I needed my local translator, Nouci, because none of these prostitutes spoke French, only Malagasy. The lovely Nouci was such a sweet, compassionate sister to have in these situations. She would always show such sensitivity in incredibly raw, delicate circumstances, and her abilities facilitated remarkably vulnerable conversations.
Everyone was smelly. Many of the people I meet on my trips had little opportunity to bathe. Sometimes the stench was overwhelming to the staff that came with me, but for some reason, I rarely had a problem with it. I like close contact with people, to touch and hug, and tangy, sour smells came with the territory. But this group tested even my gag reflexes—it was a different kind of odor, a homeless smell. The worst smelling was Nini, and she was also the most destroyed person I had met so far in my life. She—just barely—lived on the streets with her children. She told me she was about to have her fifth child any day now, and she’d already buried two of them. Her problems were an acute distillation of poverty, lack of education, gender inequality, preventable disease, unplanned pregnancy, and no way out. She never looked up, always holding her eyes in a dead, downward gaze. Even the abducted women of Cambodia and Thailand had something in their reserves that life in this country had drained out of Nini’s spirit.