All That Is Bitter and Sweet (15 page)
he airplane touched down in Phnom Penh in July of 2004 on a runway shimmering in the heat. As I stepped out of the cabin door, I breathed in a humid concoction of exhaust fumes, garbage, the musky perfume of river water, and the intoxicating smell of jasmine: Summer in Southeast Asia.
Papa Jack was waiting for Kate and me at the gate. As soon as I saw his familiar Irish face and silver hair, I knew it was real, I knew we were here to work. I threw open my arms and hugged his neck.
All business, ever on it, he said, “Let’s go,” as he led us toward customs.
Jack Driscoll, a former New York City police detective who had worked with the FBI, is a dear friend who also handles my security. There is only one “requirement” Dario has of me on my trips: Please travel with Papa Jack. We first met him in Texas while I was filming
Where the Heart Is
. He was working for Natalie Portman at the time, and his wonderful disposition and clever mind were on ample display. He was also a discreet presence—so discreet, in fact, that when we would play Botticelli to while the time away on set in between shots, he was supplying Natalie with answers. It took me ages to figure out why she kept disappearing and returning with fantastic guesses. (I mean, she’s awfully smart, but did she really know, at age eighteen, the names of all three Marx Brothers?) I knew I wanted this man on my team, even more so when he found one of my cats, Buttercup, after someone let her out of my trailer in the dead of night.
“In all the years, I’ve never lost a pet,” Jack will tell you, deadpan, in his Staten Island accent.
Jack and I began to work together when I was on location in New York City shooting
Someone Like You …
in 2000. He’s a consummate professional, making me feel perfectly safe without smothering me and all the while becoming the crew’s favorite person. That works for me, because smothering makes me nuts, and I like to fly under the radar. Once, during the filming, I hopped on the subway and asked Jack to meet me at a stop downtown. When the doors opened, I saw the platform swarming with uniformed police—a woman had just been stabbed in the station. Jack found me in the crowd and shepherded me through the police lines. A sergeant he’d known when he was in the NYPD recognized him (he seems to know everyone).
“I’d like you to meet Ashley Judd,” said Jack.
“No kiddin’?” said the sergeant.
“Yeah. We’re trying to get to the set on time.”
The next thing I knew, I was racing through the streets of New York in the back of a squad car, and he never said, “Told you so,” about my wise idea to ride the subway to the set.
Jack got his nickname on another movie we did together, where he took on the rather unpopular responsibility of wrangling everybody (which could include up to five or seven pets) on early mornings, helping us be on time. He was a father figure as well as a watchful presence. From then on, it was “Papa Jack.” I have since chosen to significantly scale back my moviemaking and let go of the blockbuster, movie-star life, but I do look back on that stretch of time with Papa Jack and our small, tight-knit crew with a great deal of fondness. He became family to Dario and me, and when he lost his wife to cancer, we flew to Staten Island to be by his side at the funeral.
Papa Jack agreed to work for PSI for a fraction of his usual rate. Despite its size and its reach, the nonprofit runs on a tight budget, which both pleases donors and maximizes our impact, and most of the travel and accommodations for my trips are donated. In this way, almost all of the money raised goes into AIDS prevention programs—a cause, it turned out, that was close to Jack’s heart. Jack told us that one of his brothers had died from complications of AIDS. This was his way of honoring his memory and giving back so that others might not suffer.
With Papa Jack riding shotgun, we merged into the Zen chaos of Phnom Penh traffic. Laid out along the branches and tributaries of the Mekong River, the capital city’s traffic mirrors the currents and eddies that surround it. Vans, pedicabs, motor scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians all drift along with no regard to right of way, paying no attention to street signs. To make matters more intriguing, people were precariously piled and perched on scooters in remarkable numbers, astride, sidesaddle, on the handlebars, and on the back fender—and holding their young while doing so. As if that weren’t enough, many were wearing pajamas. I was told that Cambodians wear their newest, most matched clothing, which often happens to be … pajamas. In this totally non-Western swirl, in bright daylight, outfitted in sleep suits, somehow they all survive and eventually reach their destinations. Ours was the InterContinental Hotel, where most folks on NGO and political business stay.
I busied myself organizing my room as I needed it to be—not a small task at the time—put all the flowers and garlands presented to me at the airport and at points along the way in special places of honor and got the Internet going so I could post dispatches from the field to friends, family, and supporters. After cleaning up and ordering a meal that would become my menu for the entire trip (something I have repeated everywhere I go; eating the same thing three times a day helps keep life simple, eliminates unnecessary sensory distractions, and helps to focus my mind and emotions). I settled in to read the briefing materials Kate had handed me. They contained the usual facts and figures, forming a snapshot of the country, plus fascinating details of how our grassroots programs work.
The Kingdom of Cambodia is about the size of Missouri, squeezed like an orange between the Gulf of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Once the seat of the ancient Khmer Empire, Cambodia was subsequently colonized by the French, bombed by the Americans, and savaged by a genocidal dictator named Pol Pot and his psychotic Khmer Rouge, until finally returning to self-rule as a constitutional monarchy in 1993. It was then PSI set up its first office in Phnom Penh.
By that time the AIDS epidemic had slipped across Cambodia’s strife-torn borders and taken hold in the brothels of Phnom Penh and other population centers. PSI found partners in government agencies, local nonprofits, and private industry to help prevent the epidemic from leaping into the general population. PSI subsidized the manufacture of “Number One” condoms and marketed them specifically for this high-risk group. They showered the brothels with condoms. The campaign seemed to be a big success in reducing infection rates. By 2002, a World Health Organization survey showed HIV rates declining in Cambodia, while the exploitative sex industry accounted for only 21 percent of new HIV infections, down from 80 to 90 percent when the program began. But Cambodia still had the highest percentage of HIV seroprevalence in Southeast Asia. And AIDS was still little understood among the country’s fourteen million people, 70 percent of whom live on subsistence farms.
My itinerary was filled with visits to brothels and orphanages, meetings with government officials, and a trip deep into the countryside to visit a program run by Buddhist nuns. My job was to learn intensively about HIV, other preventable diseases, and effective grassroots remedies and not just share this information with the media, but also receive the sacred narratives of affected people and share those narratives with the world.
Because all lives in Cambodia have been touched by the genocide, I had to confront the trauma and loss that still shapes the Cambodian experience; I spent my first morning in Cambodia at the national genocide museum. In the van with Kate and Papa Jack, I looked intently out the window on this fascinating new world as we crawled through traffic until we reached a stark three-story building near the center of the city. Tuol Sleng prison was an ordinary high school before Pol Pot converted it into a torture chamber. It has been preserved as it was during the actual rule of terror and now stands as a monument to lacerating human cruelty—austere, chilling, cautionary. I felt I could sense evil in the dank air; the dark bloodstains on the concrete floors knocked the wind out of me. As many as twenty thousand prisoners passed through these corridors between 1975 and 1979: students, doctors, innocent shopkeepers who were brutalized until they “confessed” to being enemies of the Communist regime. They were forced to name others before they were executed, and those they implicated were also arrested, tortured, and killed. Those who weren’t arrested were driven out of the cities and towns and rounded up in forced-labor reeducation camps. The country’s infrastructure was devastated in every conceivable way. The social fabric was destroyed. Even the monks were slaughtered. At least 1.7 million people were murdered in the Cambodian genocide, about a fifth of the population, including nearly every person with any form of higher education. Was I absent during the six weeks this was being taught in school? I had known nothing of this slaughter and my country’s part in it.
Pol Pot was a meticulous killer who wanted everyone inventoried, so the interrogators at Tuol Sleng kept detailed records. The walls of the museum are covered with stunning photographs of each murdered person, like a perverse high school yearbook. Visitors, most of them Cambodians who had lost family in the genocide, were holding one another, sobbing openly as they stared at the exhibits. I cried with them, totally overwhelmed. Some of the photographs seemed to speak. They were taken the instant mothers were separated from children, as vicious tricks were played, promises of amnesty made, and then torture and murder committed. There was one child who especially disturbed me; sometimes a face is archetypal, and in it I see other faces. This little boy reminded me of Dario. I was shattered. It was a haunting, deeply disturbing experience.
Later that day we visited a clinic, clean though very modestly outfitted, run by one of PSI’s partners. I sat with a woman stricken with AIDS, wasting away on her deathbed. When I asked about her family, all she could whisper was “Pol Pot,” indicating they had all been murdered.
I was beginning to grasp the intergenerational nature of trauma, how the whole population of Cambodia was scarred. Survivors were haunted; children carried their parents’ grief and guilt. A Cambodian doctor I met had survived the Pol Pot regime by pretending to be an illiterate peasant. He worked in a forced labor camp, and for four years, one wrong word, one allusion, one careless gesture, would have betrayed his true identity and led to his execution. He carried on his grueling charade even though it meant watching others die when he knew he could help them. The doctor’s desperate strategy worked, and he survived. He was now the head of Cambodia’s malaria prevention program.
To me, his story illustrated both the tragedy and the resiliency of the Cambodian people. It was one of many I would hear. The minister of commerce was twenty when Pol Pot came into power. He lost seventy-two relatives to the genocide—his entire extended family from every living generation. He told me they were so desperate for help from America, they would use rocks to spell out S-O-S on the ground, hoping that when the surveillance planes flew over, the pilots would see their message and rescue them. But the Americans had destroyed Cambodia with bombs, then abandoned the country to murderers.
Incrementally, we are making amends. I visited an American–run free hospital for the poor in Phnom Penh called Center of Hope. And USAID has been funding crucial medical projects through NGOs like PSI and its local partners. The years of war, genocide, and mass migration had turned Cambodia into one of the world’s poorest countries and a nation of orphans and widows. In 2004, women headed a quarter of households, and most earned less than a dollar a day. Many women, devoid of alternatives, succumbed to prostituted sex work to survive or were lured to the city in search of factory jobs only to be tricked, forced, coerced, and outright kidnapped into brothels, from which there is usually no escape. Desperate parents sometimes knowingly turned their young daughters over to brothels to help work off their debts, to raise money to feed other mouths at home. Some were sold outright to traffickers for international sex slavery.
Our guide into Phnom Penh’s netherworld of prostitution and trafficking was the great Mu Sochua, then Cambodia’s minister of women’s and veterans’ affairs and one of the most inspirational people I have met. She is a tiny, delicate woman with high cheekbones and a quiet, implacable resolve. Sochua was a student in 1972 when she was able to flee Cambodia and the war, but her parents were killed in the genocide. After eighteen years of exile in Europe and the United States, where she earned degrees in social work and psychology, Sochua returned to help rebuild her shattered country. She founded Khemara—one of PSI’s partners—the first ever homegrown NGO in Cambodia run by women, for women; their mission is to provide comprehensive health, education, and vocational training programs. She went into politics, and as soon as she was appointed minister, she launched a national campaign for gender equality. Politics reinforced her commitment to social justice; I have never met another official who chooses to walk dangerous public parks after dark in order to witness sexual exploitation firsthand, to continue to steel an outrage she forges into a passion for democracy.
