Free Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris

Ethiopia trip, she had written to say how much she enjoyed traveling with him and the photos he had taken. She now told him Bangladesh was her next choice for a UNICEF visit, and she wanted him to come with her.

THE SIXTH JOURNEY: BANGLADESH—OCTOBER 1989
    â€œEverybody was calling Bangladesh ‘a basket case,’ ” Isaac says, “because of the constant mishaps they had with floods, famine—you name it. But when everybody else was throwing up their hands, Audrey said, ‘I want to go there and be with them and promote their cause.’ I thought that was amazing.”
    Together, he and Audrey and Rob first visited projects for poor children in Bangkok, then quickly moved on to Bangladesh.
    â€œShe traveled to every little corner,” Isaac recalls. “In one town, she leaned over to me and said, ‘John, do these people know or care who I am?’ I said, ‘You’d be surprised.’ As we were talking, I heard this one man say to another, ‘I think that is Miss Hepburn.’ When I told her that, she turned around and asked, ‘Do you know me?’ The guy said, ‘I have seen Roman Holiday ten times!’ In the middle of Bangladesh!
    â€œOften the kids would have flies all over them, but she would just go hug them. I had never seen that. Other people had a certain amount of hesitation, but she would just grab them. Children would just come up to hold her hand, touch her—she was like the Pied Piper.”
    Cole Dodge was the UNICEF representative in Bangladesh, and it was his job to show Audrey and Rob the health-related projects connected to UNICEF. At one stop, he recalls, a crowd surrounded Audrey—as always—when she stepped from her car:
    â€œShe smiled at the children, and some of them came forward to stroke her arm and hold her hands as we walked through the village. To the side of the path, just ahead, a small girl sat by herself under the shade of a coconut tree. The little one caught Audrey’s attention, and she asked, ‘Why doesn’t she join the others?’ Walking over, Audrey knelt down and spoke with her. Then, picking her up, she hugged her close. The child’s legs, crippled by polio, dangled uselessly. Carrying the little one, Audrey walked towards us, her eyes filled with tears. None of the rest of us had taken notice of that child.” 82
    A few weeks later, back in the United States on Larry King Live, a caller asked, “How do we know when we send money that it actually gets there?”
    â€œI know it gets there because I’ve seen the results,” she said. “UNICEF money goes straight to projects and never to governments. 83 I just came back from Bangladesh [where] contaminated water is the biggest killer of children. In the last eight years, we have sunk 250,000 tube wells there.... It’s not enough to know there’s been a flood in Bangladesh and 7,000 people lost their lives. Why the flood? What is their history? How are they going to survive?” 84
    Isaac was most struck by the fact that, at any given moment, “she dealt only with what she was doing. Audrey had no color, no race. She went to Bangladesh at a time when the main crisis was over, but it was still an ongoing thing. ‘I want people to be reminded,’ she said. Today, we forget what happened yesterday with all the satellite technology. Today you are here, tomorrow there, the next day, somewhere else. How soon people forget the previous tragedy. But she never did.”
    Â 
    Â 
    RISKS HAD TO BE weighed before every trip—even to the United States. After the Pan-American disaster over Lockerbee, European fears of airline terrorism reached panic levels. But Audrey had agreed to a six-city American fund-raising tour for UNICEF, including Atlanta, where former president Jimmy Carter was to give her an award. She and Rob flew first to Los Angeles to see Connie Wald and there, at dinner one night, they met