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 on April 24th, 2008.

In 1994, when the machetes stopped hacking bodies, it was women and children who began to pick up corpses and body parts. Remains were everywhere. An already poor country bearing one of the world’s most crippling disease burdens, cholera, typhoid and other killers took additional lives as women attempted to bury bodies and build simple shelter and find safe water and a little food. The trauma was sky high. As we drive through the now clean and orderly capital, as we drink in the lovely countryside, my mind from time to time does an automatic slide show and imposes the detritus of genocide on what I see. It really is unimaginable that such protracted filthy evil ever transpired anywhere, and especially here, someplace so pretty.

Click here to see Ashley’s photos of her experience in Rwanda.

President since 2000, Kagame has worked his heart out. The result is that his parliament and minister posts are stacked with capable women, the highest female participation anywhere in the entire world (this has been codified in their constitution and government articles) and enormous government participation in the welfare of “la base,” the people. Looking at the extreme nature of what transpired, the government has reckoned that extreme solutions are necessary and the result is one of the most progressive and dynamic governments in the entire world. They stopped the genocide with no help from anyone, and they have a can-do attitude about rebuilding their country themselves. Population Services International (PSI) employs 150 people here. Only four are non-Rwandans and they are monitored closely. I even heard one refer to herself as a “transactional cost,” meaning the government tolerates her as the price of getting on with the business of improving public health.

Rwanda society is highly decentralized. It is described in units, if you will, beginning with the individual household. The next unit up is the cell, then the sectuer, the department, the province (like our states) and the national government. This is to ensure that individuals have a voice, that there is a way for their needs to be recognized and heard, to create a harmonized society where there is a profound sense of belonging and community. The expectation is that such closeness will also eliminate the possibility of the types of divisions that created the genocide. (I was told to expect that my telephone and e-mails would be monitored, as a foreign national visiting. Hmmmm. I have a lot of thoughts about this but now is not the time.)

It is remarkable how nice things are here in spite of abject poverty. The hotel is terrific, with an azure blue pool and pretty gardens. I have a little suite and each morning I stand at my window drinking tea, watching a woman with a handmade broom sweep the street below (the city employs street sweepers). All the toilets are clean, modern flush toilets, some with two modes (little flush, big flush, for conservation), and there is toilet paper available in public places everywhere. There is usually even a nail with a cloth for drying hands after washing with the bit of soap provided. The streets and fields are free of litter; there is less litter here than there is on the road between Franklin and Leipers Fork that I drive every day. They are proud, these Rwandans.

And the flowers! My Lord, how beautiful! I recognize many but don’t know the names as there are many exotic plants, but I get super excited when I see morning glory, moon vine and hollyhocks, my dearest favorites. And vegetables are cultivated literally everywhere, even in urban spaces. Houses often do not have a path to the front door; rather, the people walk in between rows of corn or runners of beans trained up bamboo sticks.