Actor and humanitarian Ashley Judd, board member of Population Services International (PSI) and Global Ambassador for YouthAIDS, will be writing posts for the ONE Blog during her March 2007 travels through India. During the trip, Ashley will address women's issues, and have the opportunity to discover how families can be empowered to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS and unintended pregnancies.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Today was fantastic. Diane from PSI and I drove over to Cotton Green, a fascinating staging area for truckers near the Mumbai dock.

The dock is such that truckers arrive in this area to wait for days while goods arrive and are loaded. It is actually is a sort of village for thousands of men; they line their colorful, hand painted trucks up according to state of origin, men of similar backgrounds making a family of choice for the time they are in Cotton Green. They sleep in their trucks, and they have a tiny little kerosene flame for cooking. The truck is their pride and joy, as it should be! They live in them, earn their living via them, and they are fabulously decorated in ways that reflect the fact that their entire lives depend on them.

These men are on the road for months at a time, crisscrossing the giant subcontinent that is India on its thousands and thousands of miles of national highway system. Away from their wives, they go to commercial sex workers often, and they are at high risk for STIs and HIV, which of course they then take home to their wives. Rural, married women are the highest new infection group in India.

Our outreach here has been in place since 1998 and was an absolute joy to see. Yellow coat wearing counselors were stationed intermittently along lines of trucks that stretched as far as the eye could see. One group was staging a very dramatic and loud play, punctuated by an attention grabbing drum beat, the plot of which was safe sex. Another group offered a ball toss game (I missed both my tries). The results lead, win or lose, to dialogues about sex: what is safe sex, what kinds of women might have HIV (any and all! Looking healthy doesn’t mean for sure she's not! Use protection with each partner!), how does one reduce risk, where are products and services available, the importance and confidentiality of HIV testing. The counselors, as always, were clear, engaging, sensitive, and handled the tone of their target groups perfectly.

When I began this work years ago, I was sick and shattered by brothels alone. Truckers in India are themselves exploited at every turn, much like the CSWs. I learned today more about the difficulties of their lives. Some Indians believe truckers are responsible for HIV and ostracize them. One man with whom I spoke longs to marry, but each time a woman's family discovers his occupation, they withdraw her availability to marry him. They are not paid a living wage, either. Poverty reduction solutions are what each of these groups, without exception, need.