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 Friday, May 2, 2008.

“But as I am yet weak in love and imperfect in virtue, I have needed to be strengthened and comforted by thee. Visit me therefore often and instruct me in all thy holy discipline … Love is a great thing, a great and thorough good. By itself it makes everything that is heavy, light, and bears evenly all that is uneven.”

I was meditating and before I knew it, I had a vision, which I interrupted midway because I was suffocating and I snapped myself out of it. It is the feeling of being Congolese that the vision brought me. I don’t know if I can describe it.

I was in dark water. I was pressed deeper into the water, into a chute and sent downward and under. When I came up for air, I discovered I was in a cave with a very low ceiling. The water was up to my chin. The rock above me pressed onto my head. There were only mere inches in which to breathe. I was to move forward, backward, sideways, every which way, precariously maintaining my nose just above the water in order to breath, to survive, looking for a way out. There was none, the ceiling was too low, the water too high, the margin for error too tiny.

It doesn’t take Jung to figure that out. One is born into it, the water and the cave, and actually at some point we all were, for we made our evolutionary leap here. The innumerable factors that conspire against our survival press down on us and box us in. In Congo, the opportunity (the ceiling) is low: no infrastructure, no roads, no public works, a ruined society, family and cultural systems decimated. And the ability to change it is confined to the desperate struggle to actually stay alive, to keep one’s head barely above water: unregulated fertility. Maternal health. Pre- and postnatal health. Malaria. Malnutrition and Starvation. Clean water issues, diarrhea, cholera, typhoid and the destination of all this, the glove on the hand, point No. 1, the low ceiling: people so poor and ill living in such chaos that no progress can be made in their society.

The event at the American Embassy went very well. We drove over about six o’clock PM and I saw good paved roads for the first time. Most embassies are in this neighborhood, as is the presidential palace, which is not ideal for our embassy’s safety. The grounds and home are big, having been part of Belgian grandiosity, once upon a time. American embassies are redecorated once every 16 years, and the Gravelinks lucked out — they moved in right after a spiffy redo. I was very comfortable there, things were so … American.

Mrs. Gravelink showed us the traveling art that embassies display and trade with one another, and I really enjoyed the Michigan artists they collect, as well as the silver, which belongs to the home. The ambassador conferred at first with a colleague, as they had met with President Kabila for 90 minutes today. I was to benefit greatly from that later, with another fascinating installment of my African studies taking place via his wonderful intellectual generosity.

Outside were oil torches, soft, barefoot-worthy grass, and the call of frogs and insects in the lush Congolese air. The great river was mere feet away. Wow. Africa. Wow. It was glorious to be somewhere safe and clean where I could sink into my Mother the Earth a little and let her hold me.