All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [76]
We gave her some food, but Papa Jack saw an older woman take it from her, and we fretted for days over whether or not she might have gotten it back.
I asked the women if I could peek inside one of the makeshift rice tents, which were loosely attached to a piece of fencing for height, with a rock or piece of garbage holding the edge down to prevent the plastic from blowing away. I squatted and then crawled through the small opening, feeling how close, how stifling, the tiny space was. I knelt on the muddy plastic for a few moments, taking it in, observing, feeling. It was one of the darkest moments of my life. The ground was littered with torn foil packets and damp condoms—which in its own way was good news. The bad news was that I could not make conscious contact with God in that hellhole. I literally felt a rebuff, like a “not here” answer, that startled me badly.
There was a transcendent moment with this group of new friends, however, and that, coupled with the fact that I spent time with them over a number of days, has imprinted them into my soul. They had their babies with them, even though they were working, and one especially young prostitute let me hold her son, Patrick. Oh, boy. He did that thing babies do when they rest on your chest, then lift their heads a bit to consider the world but decide it’s not worth it, why bother with all that, when you can simply sigh and burrow into that safe place of shelter within the bosom. I nearly died on the spot. I began to sing to him a French Christmas carol—incongruous for January, but the words just came to me:
“Il est n’e le divin enfant, chantons tous son avènement.” He is born, the divine baby, and is that not what all babies are? A spark of the divine is in us all, immutable, incorruptible. My sisters on the street began to sing with me, and when we finished, the air was different, charged, sacred. We were outside of ourselves, outside of these lives, inside something wonderful and good, the love and promise a baby can make you feel.
We stood quietly for a long moment, then Dr. Rene began a lullaby. This great man had continuously declined other jobs, options, administrative work, raises, whatever, so he could stay with the least, the lost, the last. He deserves to be enshrined. Given the geometric movement of the HIV virus, it is impossible to estimate the number of lives he has saved by teaching high-risk groups and their clients about condoms and risk reduction. Even more immeasurable is the humanity, so delicate in these circumstances, he has kept alive with lullabies such as the one he sang for us that night.
Not far from the rice tents, on a larger, boulevard-style corner, a group of older, more seasoned prostituted women welcomed me. Among them was our peer educator and shining star of the streets, Sahouly. Plump and ebullient, with bright eyes and a toothy smile, Sahouly had trained herself to offer reproductive health and HIV prevention education, and Dr. Rene had worked hard to give her a sense of self-assurance and authority. PSI paid Sahouly a small salary, as we do all peer educators, but it was unfortunately not enough to allow her to reduce the required number of seven clients per night to feed her family and make ends—barely—meet. The price of a trick on the streets here, I was told, was the equivalent of a dollar with a condom, two without. It was Sahouly’s job to keep herself safe and to explain to the others why the extra money wasn’t worth the risk.
The hotel where we were staying in Tana was under construction, with work on the floor below and the roof above my room, which for some odd reason had seventeen chairs in it. I woke up the next morning to a voice message from Dario, who called as he watched a nearly full moon rise that made him think of me. The sound of his voice made me emotional and weepy, as I’d been so lonely for him on this trip. And