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By Root 1053 0

Réseau health clinics. When we arrived at the hotel ballroom, I chose for the first time all week to speak English instead of French. I have been told by a marquis that I speak a very good seventeenth-century French, which might have been a bit formal for this setting. I thought I could transmit more spirit and attitude for the kids in the room in English. However, when dear Nouci came to translate for me, she totally froze, numb from exhaustion, and told me I had to help her! I took the mike back and translated myself into French, satisfying the government officials in the room with a little wave and shout-out when I was finished. The event wrapped when our energetic peer educators did a dance that told the story of the ABCs (abstinence, being faithful, correct and consistent condom use). After celebrating their commitment and spunk, I slunk out of the reception to sit quietly in my hotel room (the one with seventeen chairs), to pray for guidance about Nini. I called Dario and told him that if I were to leave here without helping her, her life and the lives of her children would be on my conscience. He offered to help, and I decided to present my plan to our country director in the morning.

At the airport, I was chased into the lounge by some wild Italians shouting my name. Having been on the front page of every paper (there are six) upon our arrival made privacy a joke, even down to being photographed at a swimming pool. One day I was swimming freestyle, and every time I came up for air I heard a young woman pleading, “Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!” But the attention was good for reducing the brutal stigma around HIV, and I endured the hoopla with more than my typical modicum of grace. Sequestered in the lounge with the Italians still carrying on but Papa Jack standing sentry, I told the PSI team I wanted to set Nini up in a house with no obligation for three months, to allow her simply to care for her newborn and to begin to heal. (She’d had no chance to grieve the death of two of her babies; this is something I continue to rue, the time and space so many poor people lack to process life’s insults and catastrophes.) After three months, we would explore what her interests were and put her into some kind of training or school. We would wean her off our provisional support when she had a job. We also agreed I would regularly wire Dr. Rene money for the other children’s health care needs. Although I wish I could do this for every prostituted woman in the world, I left Antananarivo somewhat satisfied that I had at least helped a few. I slept most of the way to Cape Town, waking up only to write, my lifeline in this work, and glance out the window expectantly at the South African landscape.

Chapter 11

PRAYING WITH MY PRESENCE

Meeting my hero, Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Because I remember, I despair. Because

I remember, I have a duty to reject despair.

—ELIE WIESEL

e are born alone and we die alone, and the frequent loneliness of this work resonates with the reality of individuated experience. I write to try to comprehend, process, heal, share news of the human community with those who cannot travel as far and wide as I, to raise consciousness, to raise money, to be of service, but I am ultimately alone with my response to my experiences. We all are. That is why mentors are so important, because they have gone ahead to where we have not yet been, perhaps not even in our dreams, and they look back at us with the love born of wisdom, grace, mercy, and compassion to give us hints as to how to have our own experiences with integrity. Such a mentor to me, first in spirit and now in the flesh, is Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

As a university student, I formed my politics and my activism listening to Archbishop Tutu’s speeches on LP records that South Africans, anticipating house arrest, brought to America, when they fled the repressive, racist Nationalist government. Kate Roberts knew this and had surprised me while we were sitting in the hotel lobby in Antananarivo with the news that