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 Thursday, May 1, 2008.

Victor and Therese live in a little cement house with a main room, about ten feet by ten feet, with a tiny little room on either side. They and their six children sleep on dirty, ragged pieces of foam in the tiny rooms and on a nearly collapsed two-person sofa in the main room. Actually, the side rooms are a little less hot; they each have a window, thank God. In the couple’s room, a few wires were up from which their change of clothes was hanging, and in the main room, a funny little plastic pinecone decoration suspended from the ceiling was where they stored their two toothbrushes. A nonworking refrigerator is their cupboard.

Click here for photos from Ashley Judd’s Rwanda Diaries Part Eight.

He is thin and wiry and has a bum eye. She is younger than he by many years, which is incredible to consider. Her hair was tinged with orange, and I don’t know if it got burned from something, or if that is from hunger. She has enormous cheekbones and sweet, soft eyes, especially when her husband is looking at her, which he does often.

I met this couple to learn about how their lack of information about family planning has ravaged their lives. Married 30 years now, and sharing an evident bond, they now use birth control and swear by it. I could easily see why.

Altogether, Therese has had nine pregnancies, three of which, out of mad desperation, she aborted with herbs obtained from friends. Each time, this was a painful, protracted agony lasting five days. But it was that or have more babies Victor and she could not offer anything near adequate care for, given they were already barely surviving.

(I asked what the herbs were and if, as a child, she ever knew older women who used herbs medicinally. The answer was "no" to both questions. It is really sad to me, the loss of traditional knowledge.)

One day, PSI staff who go door to door visiting people to offer education about family planning arrived at their household while Victor was out. Therese listened keenly, told her husband what she had heard, and they went to the clinic I had visited earlier to learn more. Characteristically, Victor was concerned the birth control might have some hidden, long-term detrimental effect on Therese’s health; he had already seen her suffer so much. Eventually, learning from medical staff it was safe, they started using an injectable birth control every three months.