All That Is Bitter and Sweet (18 page)

I crossed the yard to a two-walled thatched hut on stilts in which thirty-five women sat with their babies. They were taking a course in mother-child nutrition as well as medically accurate, detailed reproductive health education. I learned that they had never been taught about sex or had any child care instruction before this program. The most schooling any of them had was four years of primary school, so they could barely read. The instructors used colorful, easy-to-identify illustrations to supplement the lessons. Today the women were learning the basics of breast-feeding. Some of the most dynamic of them would be trained as peer leaders, to reach out to those who had not attended the programs—a specialty of PSI and its partners.

When school was over, we had a kaffeeklatsch, hut style. Sisterhood is delicious wherever one finds it. We shot the breeze for more than an hour, sometimes giggling, as the women told me about their lives. When I asked one of them what she called her six-week-old baby, she thought for a minute, then replied, “Naughty.” The women howled.

I think the classes were also a welcome break from the grueling routine of rice farming. They rose at four a.m., worked in the fields all day, then prepared the meals—always rice, sometimes seasoned with fish—before going to bed at eight p.m. There was no electricity and not much entertainment. But the women told me they loved to sing, and I cajoled them into a song—a haunting, trilling melody that somehow survived the years of killing. Song, spirit, memory. Some things simply cannot be erased.

So my last day in Cambodia, spent with the poor, illiterate, subsistence rice farmers of a postconflict nation, was glorious.

That night, I unfolded my mat in the hotel room and said a grateful prayer:

Thank you for toothless old women
.

Thank you for tender young mothers
.

Thank you for jumpy kids who don’t trust outsiders but are so quick to laugh and play
.

Thank you for wide-eyed babies
.

y the end of my first full day in Thailand, I had an idea for my next thriller movie: I was going to play an avenging angel of the sisterhood who rescued women who were trapped in brothels. I would work subtly and quietly in the dark, in ways so covert that my movements would go unnoticed until my sisters were safe in my arms and on their way to freedom. Then, in giant, thunderous strokes, I would overturn the operations that kidnap women and children to sell for sex. For the sequel, I planned a full-on superhero turn, upending poverty, banishing ignorance, leveling the land for the light of equality and dignity to shine across.

It was a tantalizing fantasy, but sometimes there are problems that even superheroes can’t fix in a flash. That was the lesson I learned in a grubby, neon-glitzy karaoke bar in Pattaya.

The day had started with a routine visit to the brand-new PSI offices in Bangkok. I was trying to adjust to the modern, high-rise bustle of Thailand’s capital, only an hour’s flight away but decades removed from the economic stagnation, quiet rice paddies, pagodas, and small huts of Cambodia. The office is situated in a gleaming modern tower in the city center. Vibrant, full-color posters showcasing savvy use of media and pop culture to reach young people lined the walls. Slick PSI-generated commercials with positive behavior change messages were playing on TVs.

I loved meeting the field staff, remarkable, dedicated people whose whole career paths are spent serving people in need. Olivier Le Touze, PSI’s then deputy country director in Thailand, at the border with Bangladesh was a young Frenchman whose first job was in Burma, helping refugees fleeing forced sterilization (a form of ethnic control). I had never even heard of such a thing, much less someone whose dream job straight out of college was to tackle this form of human rights abuse. I also met John Hetherington, who was relieved to be stationed in Bangkok after years in Karachi, where he and his family had to be evacuated five times after threats by militant Islamists. Working in the developing world to improve reproductive health, curb the tide of HIV/AIDS, and prevent disease is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes reaching the most at-risk people means putting your own life on the line. It is important to me to spend time with local staff, from the technical teams to marketing specialists, those writing grant applications and those in accounting, the peer educators and the drivers, the demographers, those in research and metrics, all of them, to honor them for their often unnoticed, underrewarded work and indeed the miracles they make happen every day.

Thailand was spared the ravages of war, mass murder, and fanatical leadership that hobbled its neighbors in Southeast Asia during the last century. With its infrastructure intact and an infusion of American cash, Thailand experienced an economic boom during the Vietnam War and continued to thrive in the postconflict era. Despite the current global economic meltdown, its manufacturing sector is strong, and Thailand exports more rice than any other country. But it is probably better known as a tourist destination. Most of the foreign visitors come for the golden pagodas and white-sand beaches, but a sickening percentage of them are here for sex, a readily available and very cheap commodity.

HIV/AIDS first appeared in Thailand in the mid-1980s among the male and female prostituted sex workers and intravenous drug users. From there the virus made its inevitable journey into the general population, as husbands brought it home to their wives, who then gave birth to infected babies. Unlike many governments that denied or ignored the epidemic, the Thai leadership mobilized early with a comprehensive education and prevention program. The authorities required all prostitutes to use condoms, which were manufactured and distributed by an amazingly practical Thai politician and businessman named Mechai Viravaidya, also known as “Mr. Condom.” The campaign had astonishing results: After an all-time high of 143,000 new HIV infections in 1991, the number fell to 19,000 in 2003; and overall, HIV was reduced by a jaw-dropping 90 percent. Thailand proved that clever intervention works. Mechai calls condoms “weapons of mass protection.”

Still, there were more than 600,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers in Thailand, along with ominous signs that the virus was about to make a comeback. Prevention and education program funding quickly ran dry. A new generation of young people who didn’t remember the earlier campaigns was coming of age. PSI decided to open up shop in Thailand in 2003 to help revive and supplement the programs that once worked so well. It might have been just in time: A recent survey sponsored by the United Nations had shown that 95 percent of Thais polled believed that AIDS remains a big problem in Thailand, but 75 percent of those polled—and 80 percent of people aged fifteen to twenty-four—felt that they were not personally at risk.

PSI was launching a new brand of condom called “One.” After months of careful and precise social marketing research, they determined that young Thais want to be independent, different from their parents, take what they like from the West, and create individual personalities. The upbeat campaign spoke to that. I loved the television spot that showed the One condom packet pulsing like an eager little heart in the back pockets of jeans and purses of hip young people in shops and discos, ending with the tagline: “Got Your ID?” (We have other campaigns that target businessmen whose nights out invariably end with them purchasing sex.)

Afterward we stopped for lunch at a beautiful, quiet seaside restaurant, a calm moment in the center of the storm. While we ate, a banana tree smiled at my soul. I excused myself and climbed up onto one of her graciously curved branches and turned my back on people for a moment, looking up in her crown of leaves and out at the indigo Gulf of Thailand. I stretched myself out, fully supported by her nurturing branches. “Rest, O beloved, rest in me.” Then it was time for the two-hour drive south to the prostitution capital of Asia.

Compared with the more discreet and ambiguous storefront brothels of Cambodia’s Svay Pak district, the raucous neon bars that line the streets of Pattaya look like a postapocalyptic Vegas strip for sex tourists. The resort city was a notorious destination during the Vietnam War, where U.S. Navy ships would anchor offshore and spill thousands of troops onto the beach for “rest and relaxation”—nothing more than gross sexual entitlement and exploitation. Although prostitution was and is illegal in Thailand, hundreds of bars sprouted in Pattaya, stocked with cheap liquor and “bar girls” to satisfy the demands of paying customers. After the war ended, the sex trade remained, switching gears effortlessly to service a steady stream of men, mainly from Europe and America, with a preference for young Asian flesh.

Pattaya was among the first places where HIV established a beachhead in Asia. At one point it was estimated that more than 40 percent of the prostitutes here and throughout Thailand were
HIV
positive. After a concerted effort by the Thai government in the 1990s to contain the epidemic (which was, after all, bad for tourism), the rate went down to less than 12 percent. But with a constant stream of new girls and boys coming in from the rural areas and neighboring countries, public health groups like one of PSI’s partners, had to remain vigilant in supplying condoms to the brothels and teaching the prostitutes why and how they had to use them.

We were permitted access to the brothel district, which was blocked off with a wooden sawhorse by a police officer who literally “looked the other way.” I became increasingly aghast as we progressed along the streets, where women in hot pants and glittery halter tops sat outside the bars in cheap plastic chairs, legs crossed, or stood posed sadly in postures that approximated provocation against the garish wall, as if they were living prizes in a carnival game. We parked in front of a bar, one of so many crammed onto the manic street where we had arranged to meet with a gaggle of women trapped in prostitution. Papa Jack, Kate, and a PSI staff member who would translate for me were welcomed cheerfully inside by a madam stationed behind the bar.