Spoken from the Heart (56 page)

That night, as George began his speech, I quickly interrupted him. "Not that old joke, not again," I said. "I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting here. I've got a few things I want to say for a change.

"George always says he's delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney. He's usually in bed by now. I'm not kidding. I said to him the other day, 'George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later.'" I had been close to petrified when I started, but by now the room was convulsed with laughter. I moved on to my
Desperate Housewives
bit. "Here's our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I'm watching
Desperate Housewives
--with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife. I mean, if those women on that show think they're desperate, they ought to be with George." I ended my comedic stand-up career by comparing George's penchant for brush clearing to The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and my mother-in-law to
The Godfather
's Don Corleone. The speech got a standing ovation, but my last lines were serious. "So in the future, when you see me just quietly sitting up here, I want you to know that I'm happy to be here for a reason--I love and enjoy being with the man who usually speaks to you on these occasions."

Around the world that last sentence was left out, and for years people from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East couldn't imagine why I would publicly go onstage and rib my husband. The whole concept of "roasting" a president or other prominent figure is particularly American and can be hard for other cultures to grasp. In hushed voices, foreign leaders or their spouses would ask me, "Are you really a desperate housewife?"

On July 7, just after the G8 leaders arrived in Gleneagles, Scotland, for their summit, four coordinated bomb blasts were detonated in London's subway and bus system during rush hour, killing fifty-two and injuring seven hundred. The bombings were carried out by Islamic extremists. Only twenty-four hours before, Tony and Cherie Blair had arrived in Scotland to the triumphant news that London had won the 2012 Olympics. Their elation was swiftly replaced by grief. George and I could so well understand the horror of seeing ordinary citizens attacked and murdered as they went about their daily working lives. The summit continued, but Tony immediately raced to London. The blasts overshadowed one of his central goals for the G8 meeting, persuading the world's industrialized nations to forgive the often crippling developing world debt. The problems of debt were particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa.

George and I had traveled to the African continent twice, once when his father was president and again in 2003, to the west coast nation of Senegal and the continent's southern tip, South Africa and Botswana, then to Uganda in the east and Nigeria along the western coast. In Senegal, under a blistering sun and amid blinding white sands, we walked with Condi Rice and Colin Powell to the infamous slave fortress on the island of Goree and imagined the routes that had carried their families to our shores.

The fortress is a dark and isolated place, sitting on a cliff with the waves breaking below, and its very darkness and dampness are testament to the mournful horror of what occurred inside and outside its walls. Together George and I stepped through the Door of No Return, from which captured Africans were herded on board slave ships bound for the Atlantic's deep waters. We stood in silence, as we had at other memorial sites and battlefields both in the United States and abroad. I had no desire to talk; I remained in solemn contemplation, knowing what had happened to the people who walked through this door and the doors of other coastal fortresses. I wanted to honor the lives of the men, women, and children who had been held here and those who had survived the horrific journey aboard a slave ship only to arrive on docks in the New World and be sold at auction.

This summer, I was returning to the continent with a cautious bit of hope. In 2003, at his State of the Union address, two years before sub-Saharan Africa became a central G8 cause, George had proposed a $15 billion U.S. initiative to combat the overwhelming devastation of AIDS around the world, particularly in Africa. Called PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, it focused on cutting transmission rates between mothers and children, lowering the rate of new infection among youth and adults, and putting those who were infected on antiretrovirals, with which they could often lead nearly full lives. PEPFAR also devoted resources to caring for the vast numbers of AIDS orphans. The fifteen focus countries targeted by the plan had 50 percent of all AIDS infections around the world.

Many African nations, like South Africa, have lost vast portions of their populations, including much of their middle class and their workforce, to AIDS. They were economically devastated and coping with massive human suffering. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that for well over a decade, people across the African continent were not being tested for AIDS. A positive test was a death sentence because there were almost no medicines available in these nations to treat or manage AIDS. Infected men and women continued to spread the disease. But now having treatment available meant that getting an AIDS test was no longer the equivalent of learning you were going to die. Helping to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS and to care for the sick would have a transformative effect on the continent as a whole. In July of 2005 I was going to see PEPFAR's early results.

I was thrilled to have Jenna traveling with me. Barbara had accompanied George and me on that first trip in 2003, and afterward, so moved by what she had seen and so proud of her dad's role in helping to combat HIV, she enrolled in Yale's comprehensive survey course on AIDS. She was now living in Cape Town, South Africa, and working at the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, which treated AIDS patients and other sufferers. South Africa was to be our first stop.

The press pool included Ann Curry from NBC's
Today
show, who was making her first visit to the continent and would later tell me that this trip changed her life.

Africa as a continent is life-changing. In so many places, the scenery is beautiful beyond description and the wildlife a marvel of creation. Barbara, who loved her little cat, India, with all her heart, once told me, "The existence of cats proves that there must be a Heavenly Creator," and indeed to look at lions and tigers in their full majesty is to glimpse some of that splendor. Barbara and Jenna and I were mesmerized as we drove through the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa, amid the lions, elephants, and warthogs, accompanied by a cacophony of hundreds of birds. But too often, mere steps from this striking beauty are poverty beyond imagination and tremendous human suffering. In that Cape Town hospital, Barbara held tiny babies as they struggled with the ravages of AIDS. About 70 percent of the globe's AIDS patients live in Africa.

I saw the reality of those numbers for myself when Jenna and I drove to the Khayelitsha township, where the streets were little more than packed dust and the houses woven together from strips of tar paper and tin. The bathrooms are a line of Porta-Potties strung along the edge of the township, and the walk to them is fraught with peril. Almost daily, women are raped and abused. I had come to meet mothers with AIDS, part of a special Mothers2Mothers program founded in 2001 by a California doctor, Mitchell Besser, along with Robin Smalley. Pregnant women are encouraged to come to the health center to be tested for HIV. If they test positive, they start treatments with antiretrovirals, to help prevent the AIDS virus from being transmitted to their babies. Each month 28 percent of the four hundred mothers who delivered children in the clinic were HIV-positive, but less than 5 percent of the babies born had the virus. Most of these women not only are sick with HIV/AIDS but live in cold, tiny shacks, without plumbing or electricity. They cannot see at night, and what little water they have must be stored in buckets or bowls.

Mothers2Mothers also counsels pregnant women and trains HIV-positive mothers to mentor and work with new groups of expectant mothers. In addition to paying these trained counselors, the program provides an opportunity for the women in the township to make and sell beadwork. After this visit, my staff wore their White House credentials on brightly colored Mothers2Mothers beaded lanyards.

In the clinic a small group of women, many with babies balanced on their laps, called me Grand Mama Laura and told me their stories. I held their hands as these mothers told me of how they had been disowned by their own mothers when they revealed that they had AIDS. Some women's entire families had barred them from returning home. A woman named Babalwa told me that she had tested positive for HIV when she was thirty-four weeks pregnant. She called her husband. "He thought I was lying," she recalled, "so he went to get tested himself and was positive." Her voice caught as she explained, "My life before was so violent and he was beating me and not sleeping at home and this was the result. Because he was ashamed of what had happened, he pulled himself up and we started to build up a new life for us."

Babalwa told me of accompanying another pregnant mother to her home to tell her family that she had tested HIV-positive. "When I went to her family house, there were five brothers and sisters and a mother." The young woman announced that she had tested positive. Everyone sat, shocked and quiet. Then the woman's brother stood and said, "You are not alone. I am also HIV-positive." One by one, every sibling in that room, all six children, stood up and told their mother and their brothers and sisters that they too had tested positive for HIV/AIDS. Babalwa ended with a plea "that we don't have more orphans who are losing their parents. We need more mothers staying alive to take care of their babies. We don't want any more HIV-positive babies." I thought of Barbara, holding those little babies as they fought for life.

I hugged the mothers, and I left with tears in my eyes. "Please," I said, "come and visit me in the White House." When I returned to the United States, we began making the arrangements, and they arrived in the winter of 2006. There Babalwa told me, "Dr. Mitch is our father, Robs is our mother, and we want Mrs. Bush to be our grandmother."

The stigma of AIDS cuts wide and deep across South Africa, which in 2005 had more people infected with the disease than any other nation in the world. Talking frankly about AIDS in South Africa requires talking about sexual abuse of women and infidelity, which is rampant. Men who leave their families to find work in other cities may take up with new girlfriends. Historically, women who were the victims of sexual violence and abuse have had few legal protections; Babalwa could do nothing when her husband struck her. I told the women I met, "Ending domestic violence, rape, and sexual abuse is also essential to fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS." I hoped that if I, as an American first lady, discussed those issues openly, many of them would feel less afraid to do so as well.

From South Africa, I flew to Tanzania, where, with Mrs. Anna Mkapa, the first lady of Tanzania, I visited two Catholic-run organizations working to provide AIDS prevention and care. I then traveled to a concrete-block-and-tin-roof school on the Muslim-majority island of Zanzibar, where I was joined by Zanzibar's first lady, Mrs. Shadya Karume. The school was built with seed money from the United States, replacing the mud-and-thatched-roof hut that had been the students' prior classroom. Public and private American aid had financed the construction of sixteen schools, and public and private American funds had purchased twenty thousand books for children to read. Before I departed, President and Mrs. Karume presented me with a beautiful chest filled with exotic spices, recalling Zanzibar's storied past as a fabled destination for early Western spice traders.

The final stop on my trip was Rwanda, scene of the horrific 1994 genocide, in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were shot and hacked to death by rampaging Hutu militias. Many women who survived the massacres were raped; many contracted AIDS. It is hard to envision the rivers of blood that must have run across the red, dusty hills that rise up like walls around Kigali, the capital.

Waiting for me on the tarmac was Cherie Blair. For months we had planned to travel together to Africa after Gleneagles. Her work as a human rights lawyer had made her uniquely passionate about the efforts of Rwanda to come to terms with its genocide and to try the perpetrators, both in international tribunals and in local Gacaca courts, based partly on tribal customs and also on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that South Africa had adopted after apartheid. (There was no way to try the vast numbers of perpetrators in international courts.) The Gacaca courts gave the victims the chance to confront those who had slaughtered their families and offered an opportunity for all to begin the extraordinarily difficult process of making amends.

Great Britain had invested millions of pounds per year in helping to redevelop Rwanda. The British government initially balked at covering the costs of Cherie's trip because she had no official title. She flew on a commercial jet, with one staffer and a lone protection officer--the British government had rejected my offer to take her on my plane. At the airport, she rode in the back of the British ambassador's Range Rover as it fell in behind my motorcade.

Our first stop was the Kigali Memorial Center, where we laid a wreath at one of the mass tombs; 250,000 Rwandans are buried in the soft, rain-drenched earth on the memorial's grounds. Inside were rooms containing unvarnished stories of human brutality. Babies and toddlers had been held upside down by their legs as their heads were cracked against walls, ridding the nation of the Tutsi "cockroaches," as the propagandists called them. Cherie and I stood, looking at the photos of children who died and reading the heartbreaking inscriptions underneath each image: "He loved ice cream." "She loved Daddy."

At the FAWE Girls' School the next day, Jenna and I listened as young Rwandan girls told us about their lives. After their presentations, one teacher asked his students, "Now, do you have any questions for Mrs. Bush?" A lone girl shyly raised her hand. "What did you do in the United States after the Civil War?" She was hoping to find an answer to her future in our own blood-soaked past. I told her about our president, Abraham Lincoln, who had wanted a healing rather than a punitive peace at the war's end. I told her of his dream that the two sides would reunite as one whole nation.