I'm posting a blog entry from the One Campaign website. This one is from actress Ashley Judd's journal. I really admire people who, with all the fame and comfort in life, go out of their way to help the needy and less fortunate.
It makes me wish to do a little more than just what I can right now. But I guess every little bit helps...
For other stories from ONE supporters, click on the One.blog link.
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Ashely Judd's Journal from India, Day 14
Posted by Jenny Eaton Dyer, DATA
01:30 PM Apr 12, 2007
Actor and humanitarian Ashley Judd, board member of Population Services International (PSI) and Global Ambassador for YouthAIDS, addressed women's empowerment and wrote daily posts for the ONE Blog, during her March 2007 travels through India. This week, she posts her final entries from the trip.
Monday, March 26
The alarm went off. I had naturally awakened slightly before, and was so comforted and relieved to have had a long, deep sleep. I cleaned up and headed out the door to the Saddham Wellness Clinic, which we operate in the Red Light District. I had heard so very much about it, and had a real visual expectation. I assumed it would be sterile, light-filled, modern, technical. Although it is clean and tidy, it was hardly the vision I had been having, and I realized my vision was more of an intuitive sense of the radiance and luminosity of the people who work there. They are kind, loving, empowered doctors, all of whom who could be making a lot more money elsewhere doing much easier work emotionally. They commute to a horrible neighborhood. The 3 clinic rooms are tiny and bare. They provide a range of necessary services, but cannot meet all the sex workers’ and their children’s needs; they refer them to hospitals where they don’t know how they will be treated, or if the women will even follow through.
The process of bringing a Commercial Sex Worker (CSW) to the clinic starts within the brothel, via PSI's counselors regular and faithful visits. By virtue of this consistency, trust is slowly built. Eventually, the traveling brothel doctor, who simply treats all their conditions and doesn't ask questions/make statements about their line of work, will suggest a trip to the clinic, offering a known counselor to escort the woman to and fro. The entire protocol is designed to be gentle, non-shaming, supportive, empowering, humanistic. Although our primary purpose is to prevent pregnancy, STI’s, and HIV, as well as help these women access treatment, we address all their healthcare needs as well as their children's.
I met the pediatrician. He was so kind. The kids come in with a lot of upper respiratory stuff and intense emotional issues, some TB and Malaria. I visited the examination room; the only thing that remotely suggested it was a medical facility was the stainless steel table. In the 3rd and last room, barely a cubicle, I saw where the STI and HIV testing is done. We crowded in, and I asked these doctors how they help themselves, dealing as they do day in and day out, with all they see? The subject of shutting down one’s feelings comes up a lot when I ask this question.
The clinic desperately needs additionally funding. They want to expand their services in a meaningful way, which would help reduce the number of women they need refer to hospitals, where CSWs often don’t follow through for a variety of reasons (discrimination, barriers to admission, cost, time, fear/lack of relationship). The clinic also wants to be able to provide healthcare and support to those who are HIV+. Recently, three of their women died of AIDS, homeless, turned out of their brothels. The last one, they washed her body and gave her last rights literally on the sidewalk along the gutter. The doctor wept as she told me this.
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