All That Is Bitter and Sweet (52 page)

Back at the hotel, Salma and I sat out by the pool in the tropical evening air and rehashed the journey we had taken together (which, as with all my trips, was far more extensive than the space here allows me to describe). It’s so interesting how we each have our own deeply private responses to the beautiful people we meet, the incredible things we see. We compared notes about a stop we made at a drop-in center that offered vocational training to homeless kids as well as those who passed their days on the streets hawking to tourists. I made a small friend who was on my lap or held my hand the entire visit, even when I had my hair braided. He made beautiful, intricate figurines from banana leaves, which he sold at intersections to support himself. He was no more than nine. I was torn up by the pathos of his resiliency. For Salma, the breaking point was witnessing the innocent, creative expression of children in such desperate circumstances. Watching the little ones dancing, twirling with joy, that’s when she went to pieces. She continued to teach me about admiring the positive even in abysmal situations.

The next morning I would be off to Honduras, to visit grassroots programs in a community of Garifunas, or Black Caribs, where adult seroprevalence was a shocking 8.4 percent. It would be another movable pageant of tragedy, resilience, and hope, and it was a shame that Salma had to return to Los Angeles and wouldn’t be coming along for the ride.

“You’re gonna miss me, you know!” said Salma, reading my thoughts. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”

Initially, Salma had expressed some trepidation about whether she had the knowledge and skills required on a trip like this one. I told her how impressed I was with her instant grasp of the concepts and her virtuoso performance in the field. All it really requires is humanity, I said, and she had that in spades. “You have, like, a PhD in humanity,” I said. “You are totally qualified.”

“Did I pass my test?”

Yes, Salma more than passed the test.

he cabin was dark on my flight from London to Mumbai, so I tapped out a journal entry in the small cone of light by my window seat. While I envy those who can sleep on airplanes, I do enjoy being alone with my thoughts. Tonight, my thoughts were focused on the mission ahead: It was March 2007, and I was about to embark on a three-week journey through India. It was a dream trip straight out of my childhood imaginings. But rather than focusing on Ayurvedic spas and colorful Hindu temples, I would be zeroed in on the largest slum in Asia and the largest brothel district in India. With more than a billion people, nearly one-third of whom live below the poverty line, $1.25 per day, and an estimated 2.5 million infected with HIV/AIDS, India is the mother ship, the big kahuna, of development challenges and an urgent platform for PSI. The pandemic had already infiltrated the subcontinent among the usual high-risk groups: prostituted and trafficked women, intravenous drug users, truckers, and migrant laborers. Now HIV/AIDS was poised to explode through a region that holds one-fifth of the people on earth. The need for measurable, sustainable, immediate intervention was—and still is—critical.

The usual team would be meeting me in India, along with a
National Geographic
crew who would be filming me for an hour-long documentary,
India’s Hidden Plague
, about how HIV/AIDS is spreading under the cover of secrecy and ignorance. I would also be meeting up with another special traveling buddy, my beloved yoga instructor, Seane Corn, whom I had invited to join PSI as a fellow YouthAIDS ambassador. Seane’s gritty street smarts and boundless compassion made her a perfect companion for an inevitably difficult journey.

I knew I would witness scenes of devastation, and I would listen to the all-too-familiar, always heart-wrenching stories of abused and abandoned girls and women. But a year had gone by since I’d entered into treatment, and I felt better prepared than ever to take on this work. Did I expect to hurt on this trip? Absolutely. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. But I no longer had to hurt myself. I had
recovery
. I wrote in my journal: “I am often asked, sometimes quite harshly, why in the world I do this social justice work in squalid places, and I am, by the grace of God, slowly learning that piece of my own story. Simply put, I do it because I love it. But why do I love it? I have always had an absolutely insane sensitivity to sexual exploitation of any kind—overt, covert, institutionalized, spontaneous on the street, humor in movies that is outrageous yet depicted casually like there is nothing wrong with it. It hurts me. I know now that I was abused myself, and of course, it makes so much more sense.…

“My recovery brings with it healthier boundaries, loving detachment, and the ability to serve for the sake of serving, letting go of the outcomes, not because I am unconsciously wrestling my own unresolved grief. The latter motivation is not a bad thing, not at all. To do this work, it takes what it takes, but I, for one, am glad to know why the orphans and other vulnerable children affect me in a way that before could make me ill for days. Now, when I see lost children, I know that I, an empowered adult, am nurturing and loving my own little lost child in me, and that is such a beautiful thing. We are all one, and I am incredibly moved to live this out, time and again. We are one.”

My personal goal on this trip was to feel, just once, compassion, tenderness, and—dare I say it?—love for a perpetrator. To see someone who exploits other human beings and to understand completely that the behavior is not the soul. To remember that abused people in turn abuse, that behavior is a perfect reflection of the system in which they live. To truly love just one madam, pimp, or john—even if only for a breath. That is my goal. A goal that requires a Power greater than myself, for sure. So, I prayed:

God, I am now ready that You may have all of me, good and bad. Please remove every single defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness to You and my fellows. I ask only for knowledge of Your will for me and the power to carry it out. I trust You completely to teach me how to take good care of myself, and I know that You do for me what I cannot do for myself. Thank You for this special adventure
.

And then I could not resist throwing in a small request for myself: “Oh yeah, and I’d really like not to get diarrhea like I did in Thailand, and I’d love to see a pretty temple.”

I finally dozed off, to dreams of henna tattoos and homespun cloth, of lotus petals borne on sacred rivers.

The tires bumped and the giant jet shuddered to a halt on the runway at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. As we taxied to the terminal, I saw an entire family near the runway, using pails to pull water out of a filthy ditch, in which the children were also playing. Welcome to India.

Marshall Stowell and Papa Jack were waiting, as always, to scoop me up at the gate and sweep me into town. With a population of sixteen million, Mumbai is the third-largest city in the world and the most populous in India, which is saying a lot. The scenery along the route to the hotel hummed with vitality and desperation: the monochromatic shanty roofs of Dharavi, a million-person slum where I would spend much of the next week, in the shadow of business towers and shopping malls under construction. There were families living on sidewalks, beggars, some of whom have maimed their children in a desperate attempt to manipulate money from tourists, hundreds of thousands of matching little taxis, all manner of rickshaws, flowing somewhat miraculously in multiple directions at once, accompanied by a giant symphony of horn honking. They do love to lean on their horns in ole Mumbai.

The Taj Mahal Palace was an oasis amid the chaos, a massive architectural marvel of a grand hotel. My comfortable suite looked out over a motley flotilla of ships bobbing in the Arabian Sea, and I allowed myself to feel for a moment as if I were living out my childhood fantasies of adventure.