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.


"God is a Good without drawback, and a well of living water without bottom, and the soul is made in the image of God, and therefore it is create to know and love God." —Johannes Tauler

I came through the door of my hotel room and disrobed standing inside the threshold. I went directly to the sink where I put my underthings, and the shower — where I put myself. I watched the gray, fine ubiquitous dirt stick to the tub before it finally sloshed down the drain. I used my scrubby cloth from home and tea-tree soap and scrubbed and scrubbed.

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

As we were leaving Kingabwa, a small child was standing in a plastic tub being lathered by his caregiver. He was soaped head to toe, a right good lather, even as he tried to push her off him. Her hands were sure, though, and his little-boy resistance to a scrub made no difference. His tub was in a dirt courtyard with everyone’s sweltering cement and tin homes a few feet away.

I came to Kingabwa, a hilly slum neighborhood that abuts the banks of the mighty Congo River, to meet Lydia, a 28-year-old hair stylist who was able to retire from sex work after she was reached by PSI at the age of 23. By that time, she had been supporting herself and her three living siblings with sex work for ten years.

She began as a child sex worker at 13 when she had been returned to her father from her grandparent’s home upriver in Equator by a bossy cousin. Upon the unpleasant surprise of seeing four of his five (one had starved to death) children by his second wife upon his door, he had said, “Go eat dirt.” Homeless, the four kids lasted as long as they could without shelter, food and clothing until Lydia succumbed to being paid for sex.

Her time with her grandparents, while not ideal (Angel starved there), sounds idyllic compared to this. When his first wife said “enough” at eight children, the dad found a second wife, Lydia’s mom. The three adults and 13 children lived in a three-room house until the dad, who was in the Congolese military, retired, at which point the mother suggested they take a boat to Equator to source goods from there to bring back to Kinshasa to sell. They took the two-week boat ride, and not long after arriving, the mother mysteriously disappeared, and the dad abandoned the children to the grandparents. The kids lived in a grass hut that was spacious and had windows. The water source and garden were five kilometers away, Lydia, who is a very sensitive and soft soul, spoke fondly of the time there, excepting the loss of her sibling, Angel.

Then this odd cousin on her disappeared mother’s side stepped in. She, for whatever reason, decided these children had a dad, and Kinshasa, and by God, that’s where they belonged. She snapped them up, took them to the boat, spoke with the captain (she knew river people), and said, “Drop these kids off at Kingabwa.” The four of them slept on the deck of the boat for the weeklong journey back. Their arrival, as described above, was a tragedy.