Spoken from the Heart (71 page)

That evening, as Jenna and Henry slipped on their shiny new rings, George and I basked in their love. Come fall, we would mark our thirty-first year of marriage. Our daughter was a newlywed, and we had now been together for exactly half our lifetimes.

We held their celebratory dinner in a large tent decorated with giant festival staffs, trailing flowers, and streams of brightly colored ribbons. After tearful toasts the guests danced to the music of Super T and then, late in the evening, gathered around the warm glow of a firepit. A few weeks later, we hosted a reception for Jenna and Henry in the White House.

Jenna had dreamed of marrying at the ranch since we first bought the land, and she and Henry very much wanted to marry at a place they could return to. Each spring, when the bluebonnets open and the pink evening primrose blooms, carpeting the ground as they did on that perfect early evening, I am reminded of how Henry and Jenna took their first steps together as husband and wife, beaming smiles on their faces, walking beneath a shower of fragrant rose petals.

As Jenna and Henry left on their honeymoon, George and I made our final presidential visit to the Middle East. We arrived to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. After joining in the official commemorations, George and I walked the heights of the ancient desert fortress of Masada, atop a massive, weathered outcropping of rock where 960 defenders held out for three years against the Roman Tenth Legion's attempt to conquer them all. Today Israeli soldiers make the promise that "Masada shall never fall again." On May 15, the anniversary of Israel's birth, George addressed its parliament, the Knesset. "The alliance between our governments," he said, "is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul. When William Bradford stepped off the
Mayflower
in 1620, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: 'Come let us declare Zion in the word of God.' The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. And in time, many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state." George recalled how he too, on previous visits, had prayed at Yad Vashem and touched the Western Wall.

We paid a call on some of our Arab friends as well, first King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. There I returned to visit with breast cancer patients at King Fahd Medical Center. The same female doctor, covered entirely except for the slit for her eyes, approached me and then was surprised when I did not immediately recognize her through her veils. I was delighted to learn that, though its partnership with the United States was less than two years old, the King Fahd Center had already scheduled a breast cancer conference for October, to include oncologists and cancer specialists from around the Middle East.

In Egypt I visited the coral reefs around the Red Sea port of Sharm al-Sheikh and from a glass-bottomed boat watched as sea life moved in silence among the brilliant-colored coral. On land I launched an international Big Read program between American and Egyptian high school students. The Egyptians read
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath,
and
Fahrenheit 451,
while the American students read
The Thief and the Dogs,
a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz.

Come June, I made my third and final visit to Afghanistan.

I began in Bamiyan Province, where those ancient Buddhas had been destroyed seven years earlier. From almost any spot in the valley I could gaze up and see the empty niches, hollowed deep into the stone. Today Bamiyan has a female governor and is one of the safest provinces in the nation. In my 2005 visit, when I met her in Kabul, I had promised Dr. Habiba Sarabi that I would come to her home. When my helicopter landed, Governor Sarabi was waiting on the dusty ground. We embraced, and I said, "I told you I would come."

On full display was a group of Kiwi troops, who were there as part of the New Zealand army and New Zealand's provincial reconstruction team. In tan desert camouflage, they did a full native Powhiri dance; a few men had donned body paint and waved long, pointed spears as the Secret Service watched warily.

A short way from the landing strip, where the helicopters remained parked and ready and surrounded by armed guards, Governor Sarabi and I entered a police training facility. In spare prefab buildings, Afghans were learning the basics of law enforcement, and in one room, with dark curtains on its high, tiny rectangular windows, the trainees were women. Eleven Afghan women had come here to study basic police work. Seated at their rows of desks, their slightly bent heads veiled and bodies fully covered, they asked that no photographs be taken of their faces. At that moment, I felt the depths of their bravery; they were concealing their identities not merely from local insurgents or opium poppy merchants. Many of these women's own families did not know that they were training to be police officers.

From the academy, Governor Sarabi and I traveled farther into the valley, past scrubby fields. There, in the shadow of the ancient Buddha's remains, mud-brick walls were rising. It was the first floor of what would become a new, two-story school for Afghan boys and girls. The school was being constructed by the Ayenda Foundation, an offshoot of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council. Ayenda was founded in 2006 by two council members, Shamim Jawad, the wife of the Afghan ambassador to the United States, and Timothy McBride, who had worked for Gampy as an assistant to the president in the White House. The money to build the school had been donated entirely by American and Afghan citizens.

Before I left Bamiyan, I cut the ribbon for a new highway built by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The new road followed one of the ancient Silk Road pathways, but today it led not over the mountains but to the airport, so local entrepreneurs might sell and ship their goods to Kabul and beyond. Then the helicopters lifted off for Kabul and the Presidential Palace, where President Karzai was waiting. We met and spoke to the press. In other rooms of the palace I visited with students, young men and women from Kabul University, as well as from the new American University of Afghanistan and the International School of Kabul, whose formation I had announced only three years before. For these students it was their first time on the Presidential Palace grounds. But I had to remain inside the palace compound; I could not walk the streets of Kabul, past store windows and open front shops, and my plane had to be in the air by dusk.

Vast swaths of Afghanistan still had no electricity or running water. But the lack of knowledge was the worst of all. Bamiyan, for example, has for years been a rich potato-growing region. But local farmers now had no storage facilities for their crops. They could not preserve their harvest to eat during the harsh winters, nor could they keep their surplus to sell when prices were high. Instead, they hawked their freshly dug crops in local markets, and whatever they did not sell rotted. Then an Idaho potato farmer recalled how his own grandparents had stored their potatoes, in a simple dugout cellar. He taught Afghan farmers to do the same. There are hundreds of stories like this, of soldiers who came back after they left the army, of retired police officers who came over as police trainers. Colonel Gary Davis, who served as surgeon general for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, returned to Kabul after he retired from the military to teach Afghan doctors and nurses how to care for some of the country's most serious pregnancy-related complications. Despite the obstacles and the dangers, these Americans have given so much of themselves to make other lives better and have asked nothing in return.

And the obstacles are many. In January of 2008, a group of female Afghan parliamentarians came to see me at the White House. They spoke of the severe threats that women continue to live under in all parts of Afghanistan and of how much they feared the Taliban's return. One of them told me, "This is our only chance."

But I remember too one of my friends who said, "We talk so much about helping Afghan women. What about the men? It seems to me they are the ones who need to change most of all."

Slowly, some are changing. There are illiterate men who are happy to have their daughters enrolled in school and learning to read. Days after my Afghan visit ended, I spoke at an international donor conference in Paris hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy. He had convened eighty nations and organizations to secure more global aid for Afghanistan. Already over 6 million Afghan children were attending school; 1.5 million of them were girls, who had been banned from the classroom before 2002.

I made my case and hoped that this "only chance" would be enough.

After Paris, George and I traveled together to Slovenia, to attend our last U.S.-European Union Summit. As I left Europe, I thought of the many friendships we had made with foreign leaders. I would miss German chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband, Joachim Sauer, whose quick minds and lively conversation warmed our visits. We had stayed with them in the German version of Camp David, an old manor house located in the former East Germany that had been fully restored. In return, we had invited them to visit our ranch, where we hiked and talked. I had built a friendship with Aliza Olmert, wife of the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who was herself an accomplished artist. And I had taken great joy in my visits with the king and queen of Jordan. But it was also time for us to move on. Tony and Cherie Blair had already left 10 Downing Street. Soon we would be leaving the White House.

But first I wanted to see the Burmese border lands.

From the air, on August 7, everything below me was green, that rich, overgrown green of Southeast Asian jungles and the wide plumes of stunted mangrove and towering native oak trees. As the small American military cargo plane descended, I could see the roadways cutting through and catch a quick glimpse of the narrow city streets of Mae Sot, punctuated by the brilliant gold-leaf dome of the temple pagoda. I was in northern Thailand, and just beyond lay the country of Burma.

George and I and Barbara were on our way to the Beijing Olympics, and George had wanted to make one last visit to South Korea and then to Thailand before we arrived in China. If we were going to Thailand, the two places I wanted to go were the Mae La Refugee Camp and the Mae Tao Clinic. Barbara was eager to join me.

The summer air was wet and humid, and people were waiting impatiently for the onslaught of the rainy season. My clothes stuck to my skin almost from the moment I stepped off the plane. A large welcoming party was waiting for us on the tarmac, the governor of Thailand's Tak Province, the deputy governor, the chief judge, the Mae Sot district officer, the commander of the provincial police, the mayor, the chairman of the municipal council, the U.S. consul general, and sixty schoolchildren waving flags. From there we departed for the Burmese border.

The Mae Tao Clinic is the place Dr. Cynthia Maung calls home. She is a Burmese doctor who fled into Thailand in 1988, when she was twenty-nine years old. She was running from chaos; in the cities, Burmese troops knelt and fired repeatedly on unarmed demonstrators protesting the repressive junta. To silence some of the protesters, the regime's forces rounded them up and drowned them. Dr. Cynthia escaped by walking through the jungles at night. When the sun rose, she slept in fields. She crossed the border at Mae Sot and began life in a refugee camp. Soon she was setting up a primitive medical clinic to treat refugees who arrived with war wounds or who had contracted malaria. She sterilized her instruments by boiling them in an aluminum rice cooker and thought she would return home in two, possibly three months. Twenty years later, she has made only brief forays across the jungle-laced border to care for the sick in Burma. She remains in Thailand, at her clinic, where she is known as the Mother Teresa of the Burmese.

I had already "met" Dr. Cynthia via a White House teleconference on Burma, but now I had the chance to talk to her face-to-face and to shake her hand. I walked into her open-air clinic, and the first thing I saw was a volunteer American doctor performing cataract surgery in a building with open windows. Outside the rains of a tropical thunderstorm poured down, turning the paths to mud. In another section was a row of picnic tables covered with plastic shields. That was where they placed the newborns. They weighed the babies on a vegetable scale, laying each on a paper napkin. The clinic also fits prosthetics--legs, arms, feet--for all the people who lost limbs to the many land mines planted by the military junta. Refugees are being trained to make the prosthetic molds and casts, for which there is near-constant demand. Fifty thousand Burmese also cross the border each year to visit Mae Tao to seek medical care. Many walk hundreds of miles from deep inside Burma to the clinic. I left behind crates of donated supplies, including thousands of bed nets to help prevent malaria, which is rampant in the region.

Thirty miles away, pushed up against the sides of steep, forested mountains, their tops obscured by drifting clouds and rain, is the Mae La Refugee Camp. The sprawling camp winds its way around six hills at the Thai-Burma border. Today children who were born in Mae La two decades ago are having children of their own. None of them has ever set foot outside Mae La's compound of muddy paths and hutlike homes. Thai law requires them to remain confined to their camps in a stateless limbo. More than 140,000 Burmese refugees live in camps like this strung along the Thai-Burma border, nearly 40,000 in Mae La alone, at least according to official estimates. The actual totals may be much higher. Beyond the camps, as many as 1.5 million other Burmese live inside Thailand.