All That Is Bitter and Sweet (49 page)
Our military escort was waiting as our helicopter landed in a cow pasture on the edge of the town of Coatepeque. So were two Maryknoll nuns, Sisters Dee and Marlene, who were waving wildly and looking so sweet and gentle standing there next to soldiers in camo fatigues with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. But it turns out they are indeed warriors as fierce as any soldiers in a munitions army. Their weapons are love, compassion, service, devotion, hope, and faith, and I believe they are mightier. I have to. My own hope and sanity depend on it.
Coatepeque is a border town on Highway 1, which runs along the Pacific Coast of Central America, a major trade and smuggling route. Along with the traffic comes HIV, which is prevalent here in much higher percentages than in other parts of Guatemala. Sisters Dee and Marlene run Proyecto Vida (Project Life), a comprehensive care, testing, and prevention program in a region with very scarce services for people with HIV/AIDS.
Sister Dee, born Delia Marie Smith in Lancaster, England, is a stout, energetic woman with close-cropped red hair and a gentle, high-pitched voice. No wimples and habits for this nun; she wore stud earrings and was dressed in a T-shirt and slacks as she showed us around the facilities. It was a bare-bones operation in a run-down building in a town where the electricity goes off at least once a week. The narrow hallways were dark for a while this morning, but the staff was sunny and upbeat—all HIV-positive women who came to the sisters for care and stayed on to help. Sister Marlene, wearing a plain cotton skirt, was more reserved and stayed in the background during the tour, but she joined us when I yet again exploited the opportunity to ask beautiful, devout people to pray with me (one of my selfish trademarks!). Sister Dee started us off with a simple, gorgeous meditation about the nature of our work, reminding me that prayer doesn’t have to be verbally acrobatic. It’s just chatting with the God of our understanding. She said, simply, we are women gathered here to help people living with HIV, and indeed, that is what Proyecto Vida is all about.
She and Sister Marlene had more than seventy years between them with the Maryknolls, an order for which I have the utmost admiration. The Maryknolls’ mission takes them to some of the most precarious and forgotten locations, where they minister to the poorest and most rejected people on earth, regardless of their faith. The saintly Father Michael, whom I met in the Buddhist AIDS hospice in Thailand, is a Maryknoll. And, as I remembered from my days as a college campus activist, two Maryknoll nuns were among four Catholic missionaries who were raped and murdered by a death squad in El Salvador in 1980 as a warning to those who would advocate for the poor. During the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, Catholic priests and nuns were often persecuted for siding with the people in the struggle for human rights and economic justice. Another exceedingly blatant attack occurred when the archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was gunned down by an assassin while serving mass in his chapel.
Sadly, the prelate who later stepped into Romero’s position represented a far more conservative faction in the Church. I had met with Archbishop Fernando Sáenz Lacalle during a quick trip I had made to a regional AIDS conference in El Salvador in November 2005 to try to open a dialogue about the Church’s stance on prevention. He was cordial, but it was clear that his ears were firmly closed to any discussion about reproductive health. He even said during the meeting that he thought women used abortion as birth control. He also held to the hard line that Rome had adopted against condom use, even to prevent HIV infection. I was unsurprised, given the Vatican official who in 2003 had said something equally ridiculous: that HIV can pass through condoms. Thank goodness that in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI said condoms are justifiable in limited cases, in order to prevent AIDS. A modest statement based on the public health reality, but quite revolutionary from the Vatican’s previous hard-line stance.
I couldn’t help but contrast the rigidity of the Salvadoran archbishop with the loving pragmatism of these luminous Maryknoll nuns. Sisters Dee and Marlene told me that they believed that in each person, dignity inheres, and that dignity entitles them to bodily, sexual, and reproductive autonomy. Proyecto Vida provides condom education with PSI’s help. Whether or not they want people to use them, the nuns believe that people have the right to know how to protect themselves and they, and they alone, without interference from a patriarchal superstructure, must be empowered to make that choice.
The mission of the Maryknoll sisters is simply “to make God’s love visible.” I saw their work in action in the women who worked for Proyecto Vida, such as Luz Imelda Lucas. Luz had lost an infant to AIDS, as well as her husband, who had infected them. She was brought back from the brink of death with antiretroviral medication made available by Doctors Without Borders. Now, she worked as a nutritionist. She told me her service to other vulnerable women filled the void these losses had created. I was also introduced to a married couple, both of them HIV-positive, whose bittersweet story was heartrending. Melchor and Catalina had come to the clinic to deliver their second child by cesarean section in order to protect it from contracting HIV in childbirth. Their first baby, delivered naturally, had died of AIDS. As with many couples, it took the death of a child to alert them to the fact that they were HIV-positive.
Melchor, a compactly built man with sun-leathered skin, told me he became infected when he lived in Guatemala City and ran with a fast crowd. Even though many of his friends were becoming sick, he had never been taught how one contracted HIV and had no idea how to recognize its symptoms. When his own health started to fail, he thought his fevers were caused by colds. And so, unknowingly, he brought the virus back home to his young wife. She was sitting quietly next to him as he spoke, great with child and wiping her face with a handkerchief, in palpable fear of the impending procedure. I leaned gently toward her and said, “Don’t worry. I was delivered by C-section and I turned out okay.” That brought a small smile to her lips. She was also reassured that her baby would be much safer. A study in Guatemala has shown that while nearly half of babies born to HIV-positive mothers are infected with the virus, with interventions such as antiretroviral drug treatment and C-sections, the risk of transmission is reduced to less than 8 percent.
Melchor told me that his own mother had died when he was nine days old, and he treasured his wife, that he’d protect her with his life and would never leave her, in sickness, health, good times, hard times, you name it.… He was obviously a kind man, and he was going to be a wonderful father. He testified to the toll AIDS has taken on men as well as women in poor countries. Men see themselves as protectors, but they are helpless to keep their families safe from AIDS if they don’t have the knowledge to do so. Men as well as women need to be empowered with the tools to fight the pandemic.
I told my new friend that I had an appointment to meet the president of Guatemala tomorrow to discuss HIV/AIDS. When I asked what message he’d have me give the president, Melchor spoke with vigor about the urgent need for sex education at home and in schools. His spiel was as articulate as any printed NGO material I’d ever seen. I told him he was an activist and encouraged him to continue to use his voice.
However good an advocate I was becoming, I lamented that it was I, and not he, who had an appointment with his president. The world will be more just, more right, when it is Melchor and his wife, and not an American movie star, who has such access, who can tell their stories to the elected officials who represent them.
The next morning, I was told, a beautiful sweet-faced baby daughter named Milche Guadalupe was delivered without complication. Because she couldn’t be tested for HIV for eighteen months, I will never know her status. As with so many others whose lives have touched mine, I can only pray and turn Milche and her parents over to the care of a loving God.
As I prepared to say my goodbyes to the Maryknoll sisters, I started to feel a lot of pain well up in me. The suffering I had witnessed was all so unnecessary, so preventable. When I asked Dee and Marlene how they managed to keep up their hope, they both spoke of the need to stay grounded in one’s faith, one’s personal connection to God. I understood that, of course, but on this day I felt the need to grieve, too, for all that had been destroyed, for all that had been suffered, for all who died so unnecessarily, so traumatically, in poverty, often without dignity.
Yes, I knew all about the need for education, that ignorance is the enemy, that the empowerment of any single individual sparks a miniature revolution. But the injustice of it all made me want to rage and scream and cry. I usually didn’t start to feel this way until a few days into a trip, and I wondered why it had happened so quickly this time. The fear I had felt that morning had already traveled into anger. I had to ride it out and hope I could process the anger and come out on the good side of its gifts: energy, strength, and motivation. It was either that or I’d be up again all night with that awful anxiety in my chest.
Luckily, an important ally and dear friend was arriving later that evening to help me on the journey.
I was already in bed and reading through the daunting itinerary for the rest of the week when I heard Salma Hayek’s voice in the hallway. I could not restrain myself from jumping up to greet her, so I pulled on a robe and ran down the hotel hallway to her room, ending up on her bed and talking half the night. It’s like that when we see each other: With both of us as busy as we are (and as much as I had isolated myself in recent years), we always have much catching up to do. I wish I had a nickel for each time I said, “Oh, this is the last thing I’ll say, then I’ll go to bed!” It was a lesson to reach out more, not to let it all pile up.
The next morning, Salma and I had a discussion about what to wear during the week. I refrain from trying to pass myself off as a business-person or someone in the UN or whatever on these trips. Unless it’s a formal meeting, I just dress like myself, wearing what I always wear, my usual gear from Anthropologie, dresses and occasionally linen pants and T-shirts, and Salma decided to do the same.
We started off with an excellent press conference announcing Salma’s arrival and her participation in our AIDS awareness campaign in conjunction with ALDO, the Canadian shoe and accessory company (which Salma handled seamlessly, like the pro she is). Then we visited a free AIDS clinic and hospice in one of Guatemala City’s toughest neighborhoods, La Terminal. The facility was run by Fundación Marco Antonio, one of PSI’s partners. I was delighted to find it spotlessly clean, the sheets matching, and the dozen patients living with HIV wearing new sleeveless flannel gowns. I crawled onto one bed, Salma sat on another, and we each listened to the stories of women who were dying of AIDS. Salma was a natural at the work, because she loves being with people and they know it. Being a native Spanish speaker and gifted translator further enriched the experience for all of us.
My new friend, a frail woman with a gaunt face, had two children living in Atlanta whom she hadn’t seen in ten years. Her grief surged up each time she mentioned them. They didn’t know she was HIV-positive, and she was afraid to tell them. Her family here in Guatemala had shunned her; her father-in-law threw away a cup after she drank from it. She spoke of the clinic as the only bright spot in her painful life, a place where she was accepted and loved. She talked about trying to be the best lead “cow”—an idiomatic expression—meaning she could influence other HIV-positive patients by keeping up a positive attitude of her own. But, she said, she was struggling. She had attempted suicide twice. In the few minutes we had together, I shared with her what I’d learned during my own hard times about the need to love myself and offered that there was much to love about herself.
As Salma and I were working our way through all the patients, we heard a commotion on the street below that signaled the arrival of another of my guests: Juanes, the Colombian rock superstar and one of the biggest celebrities in Latin America. Outside the clinic, Papa Jack’s security team had their hands full as word spread of Juanes’s arrival and thousands of Guatemalans filled the streets for a glimpse of him. He was a slender man with a boyish shock of brown hair and eyebrows that Frida Kahlo might envy. Juanes bounded up the stairs to greet everyone, then took out a guitar and gave an impromptu concert for the patients. Then, just as Salma and I had done, he sat down to talk with AIDS patients, hugging them in front of the cameras to transmit the powerful message that while the virus should be feared, the people who suffer from it should not. Later, he recorded a public service announcement for us that would reach millions of his fans with the message that real men use condoms to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Meanwhile, Salma and I raced back to the hotel to change clothes for our “private” audience with Oscar Berger, the president of Guatemala. We arrived at the palace to discover that he had pulled a big switcheroo on us. Instead of a substantial, behind-closed-doors talk with him about policy and programs, he staged a raucous press conference, apparently in order to preempt our own events and attract the lion’s share of attention for himself. Salma, Juanes, and I had to plaster polite smiles on our faces as President Berger herded us through a mob of reporters and camera crews toward a waiting dais.