Editor’s Note: Our friend, Ashley Judd, joined YouthAIDS as Global Ambassador in 2002, after seeing the effects of HIV/AIDS on communities and children in the United States and around the globe. With no cure in sight, and the realization that education is the only way to prevent the spread of this disease, Ashley uses voice and platform — on behalf of those without a voice — to promote YouthAIDS’s programs and to provide young adults with immediate solutions for fighting the global epidemic. Most recently, Ashley went to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she kept a daily personal journal detailing the heart-wrenching experience. Each week this summer, wOw shares one diary excerpt and corresponding photos from her trip.

The following journal entry was written over the course of Tuesday, April 22nd and Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Travel Day(s)

Days plural, as I rather enjoyed a forced layover in Brussels when my flight to Kigali was delayed by 24 hours. Beginning the night before at Mum and Dad’s (in Scotland), I was having a funny feeling about my flight. My intuition coupled with my imagination made up that it would be my bags that wouldn’t make it. I surrendered this possibility, trusted I have everything I need in my heart, soul and brain and my small carry-on and went to sleep. Do first things first, do what’s in front of me; the gift of these slogans was such that the trickiest part of preparing for two weeks in Africa was making my pallet on the floor when my husband kept driving his race car in his sleep.

Click here to see Ashley Judd’s photos from the start of her trip to Rwanda.

We were up very early and we did a good job getting to the airport (ha ha to all of you who rag on us for our notorious aversion to early mornings). My originating flight would not allow me to either check in for Brussels-Kigali or check my bags all the way through; hmmm, that instinct hummed again. When I eventually made it to the right counter, I was informed that I was done for the day, stuck in Brussels for 24 hours. The aircraft was still in Kinshasa, D.R.C., which I, coincidentally, fly to later in my own journeys.

Earlier in the morning, before I knew about this long delay, I’d been having a small thought about how, if for some reason I stayed in Brussels, I would likely find an absolutely terrific meeting of Fellowship, of which I am a member. I am not so evolved that when this became not just an odd thought but my plan for the day, I smiled. I began rather to pick apart each of my choices during the still-young day and analyze pointlessly how I might have discovered this cancellation sooner and how that might mean I’d still be in bed with my beloved. What a daydream that was! Soon enough, however, necessity took over and I began the process of finding a hotel room and covering my ass for the next period of time.

On the public phones (reevaluated choice #36: never travel without Scottish mobile), I caught myself becoming really irate trying to place a collect call to American Express. The service provider, however, was determined instead to make money off my call and I actually hung up on the operator to take some breaths. Hanging up was a courtly gesture of sublime good manners compared to where I was going if I kept talking to the fool. In order to ensure collect calls are not placed via them (and one has no other phone choices in this airport) they simply do not dial the number. I would have paid for the call or provided an alternate number if there was one on the back of the card, but both were toll free.

Anyhow, more important than catching an international travel catch-22, I caught myself. In the not-so-long-ago distant days, an episode like this would have been a perfect chance at “justifiable anger,” an excuse to rage, to take out any and all anger I might have about abruptly displaced travel plans, the powerlessness and indignity that mark current air travel, underpinned by any fear (and fear of pain!) I have about my forthcoming journey. I did not have to, and that is by the grace of a power greater than myself.