Thank you very much. Thank you, Jo Luck. I remember that 1989 conversation, and even though sometimes in the service of Heifer you exaggerate, you actually said everything you said at the time. In 1989, only my mother thought I could be elected President, Hillary and Chelsea were undecided.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great honor for me to be here. Mr. Mayor, Reverend Clergy, Governor Huckabee, let me say, I have loved working with you on this childhood obesity initiative, and you did a great job at the Governors Conference and I thank you. America should be proud of you for what you are doing on that. My old friend, Charles Stewart, thank you for being here, members of the Little Rock City Board, City Manager, Bruce Moore, Mayor Hays. I have to acknowledge the presence of Congressman Hammerschmidt, who more than anyone else is responsible for me being President, because if he hadn’t defeated me for Congress 32 years ago, I never would have made it, and I thank you. I am glad you are here today. Thank you.

I would like to thank young Beatrice Biira for being here today. As many of you who are Heifer fans know, she is an inspiration and subject of a children’s book for which Hillary was pleased to write the afterward, and she interned for Hillary not very long ago. So her story really is, as Jeff Sachs said, symbolic of what we are trying to do here. I’ll say a little more about her and Jeff in a moment. Let me say, that Heifer started just a little over 60 years ago, and when Heifer started, and when I was born here a couple years afterward, almost half the people in Arkansas lived below the national poverty line in America. And it’s important not to forget that this great organization still works in American states among our people with the same philosophy and action, and I am grateful for that as well. I loved what Jeff said about economists trying to figure out whether things that work in fact will also work in theory. This great, vast global enterprise that we honor today started with an adage that virtually every single person in this audience, at least over a certain age, was taught as a child, “It’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish.” But if you teach them to fish, then they have an obligation to pass it on.

In this interdependent world, that Professor Sachs so eloquently described, we worry about many security problems. We worry about terror, weapons of mass destruction. Thank you, sir, for mentioning that the possible spread of infectious disease, such as avian flu, and global warming are also security threats to these children’s future. In a world where you have security problems and you can’t kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries and some of them aren’t even human, you have to have a world with more partners and fewer enemies and in a fundamental way, one by one, that is what Heifer does. Don’t ever forget the numbers. We celebrate the remarkable renaissance of this city and county and how far our state’s come from where it was when Governor Huckabee and I were little kids in Hope, Arkansas.

Let’s not forget that today half the people on Earth live on less than $2 a day; half, one billion people live on less than $1 a day; a billion people, at least, will go to bed hungry tonight; a billion people will never have access to clean water, which is why 3 million people die every year from water-borne illnesses and 80% of them are 5 years old or younger; 2 1/2 billion people never have access to sanitation facilities. One in four of all the people who die on Earth this year will die from war, conflict, terrorist actions, diseases, natural disasters, heart attacks, strokes, or cancers. One in four of all the deaths will come from AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to diarrhea. Nearly nobody in Arkansas will die of any of those conditions this year. Nearly no one in America will die, but many parents will weep across the world because they don’t have things that we take for granted.

When I was President, I worked hard in America and around the world on the anti-poverty philosophy that Heifer represents. We granted debt-relief in 2000 and we said, “We’ll give you this debt-relief, but you’ve got to put the money into education, health care or economic development. When we opened our markets to African countries, we created hundreds of thousands of jobs buying their products with no burden on the American economy. We gave 2 million micro-enterprise loans to people a year. I’ve been in villages in Africa and Latin America where the local treasurer of the micro-enterprise fund would bring out his little shreds of paper showing me how each villager had used the loan, because we were trying to teach people to fish. But there was no serious effort on this, really, until about ten years ago. Most of our foreign aid from the end of World War II forward, was designed to make sure our side won the Cold War. We did a little bit, but less than anybody else, and we still don’t do enough.

President Bush, to his credit, has continued that with the AIDS program, which now provides a significant portion of the world’s funds to fight AIDS and he is now doing more on malaria, as Jeff said, and the Millennium Development Program, which requires countries to have a plan to empower their people in return for aid. But we have a long way to go.

The point I want to make about this is the numbers are so large and the work has to be done so much person by person, village by village, nation by nation that even if we were living in a country today and even if every person in every wealthy country in the world, in Europe, Japan, everywhere in the world, were living in a country governed by only people they voted for, who pursued policies that they completely agreed with, there would still be a gap between what governments would do and what the people of the world need. And into that gap, must step people like you.

One of the most important things that has happened since the end of the Cold War, is that ordinary people of even modest means have the power to change lives half a world away. When the tsunami hit South Asia, a third of American households gave money -- over half of them over the Internet. When former President Bush and I were trying to help raise money for Katrina, a lady came up to me at the New York State Fair out from behind one of the booths on the midway where, you play those little games and throw balls at targets and win stuffed animals. This lady was not a dot.com millionaire; she was working at the state fair and she stuffed 50 bucks in my hand, and said, “This is for those folks down in the Katrina area. I’m sorry to give you cash, but as you can see I am working and I can’t send it over the net.” And I thought, “This is an inconceivable conversation just two years ago.” The same kind of people who sent that money to the Tsunami are the same kind of people who can help Heifer reach even more people around the world. The rise of the non-governmental organizations has given ordinary people the power to do massive public good all over the world as well as in their neighborhoods. And honestly, when you were up here speaking, Tererai, I wished I didn’t have to say anything. I wish nobody would say anything. I wish we’d just listen to you and look at you. And remember what I learned as a little boy so long ago: Intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the world, most poor people work at least as hard as rich people and usually harder. What is not equally distributed is opportunity and organized systems that allow people a chance to live their dreams and the NGO movement has to do that.

One of the most important advances in recent years has been what Dr. Sachs has done with these Millennium villages. Village by village they try to think of everything that has to be done to create a structure of opportunity that will give people, however limited their circumstances, a chance to live their dreams. And that’s what we were trying to do by bringing the least expensive AIDS medicine and testing equipment to people around the world and helping to build health care systems. The point I want to make about this is, people like you and me who aren’t in government have to do a lot of this work. It’s no accident that TIME Magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono the “People of the Year” this year. They don’t hold any political office; they lead massive citizens’ movements. But long before Bill and Melinda Gates, long before Bono, long before Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Prize largely for the work he did after he left the White House, long before we started giving hundreds of thousands of people the least expensive AIDS medicine on Earth, long before any of that, and long before the Millennium villages, Heifer was there, largely unknown even to the people in its home state.

So today we say to the world, “Look at these people and give them your hand.” If a young girl from Atlanta can raise $5000 at the age of seven, if she can do that, if she can even go out of her hometown and go to other schools and make presentations and hit them up for money, the least we can do is to make more stories like the ones you’ve heard.

A couple of weeks ago in the press there was an astonishing survey reported: a global survey of people’s attitudes about their lives. Tens of thousands of people on every continent were polled, and guess what? The most optimistic continent on Earth was Africa and no one who has ever spent time there will be surprised by this. In South Africa where we put a City Year project, they adopted as their theme the great “ubuntu” saying, which in English is, “I am, because you are.” Our interdependence is at the core of our very existence. In another nation where I work, when people greet each other walking on mountain trails, if someone says “hello” or “good morning,” the answer translated into English is: “I see you”.

Now when I was a kid, we never had enough money to take a vacation and the movies ran for a long time at one theater in town, so our only real avenue of entertainment was conversation. We didn’t have a television until I was ten. And we were all taught to see everybody. Now that we’ve got television and some of you are Tivo-ing the basketball games because you are stuck here and we are thinking about all this other stuff, you just think about the people you do not see. Jo Luck has the people who built the building up here as guests today. You think about how many buildings you walk in; you never see them and all these people around the world that you will never physically see, you have to see, because they are going to shape your future. So I thank you for being here, but I ask you to do what all of the other people who made this day possible in the last 60 years have done. The need is great, but the power to meet it is now equal to the need. It just remains for you to step into the breach. Thank you and God bless you all.