Thank you very much. Thank you, Richard Roth, for the laughs. You woke me up. I got in at four this morning from a trip to Asia. I think I know where I am, and I think it's morning somewhere. Mr. Secretary-General Annan, Secretary-General Designate Ban Ki-Moon, ladies and gentlemen of the UN Correspondents Association, I am honored to be here, honored to receive this award in memory of Sergio Vieira de Mello, someone I admired very much, and a person whose life and death reminds us that we live in a world where trying to pull people together across their differences is not free of danger, but it is not a job we have a right to refuse.

In general, I don't think former Presidents should receive awards, because the job itself was enough. In general, I don't think they should turn down any request to serve, because if you get a chance to do what you long to do with your life, you owe the rest of it to other people. So I am profoundly honored to receive this award, because I admire the person for whom it is named so much, and because I admire the Secretary-General so much, and I wanted to have one more chance to praise him publicly.

I believe the UN is generally underappreciated and not well understood in the full reach of its activities, so among other things, I wanted to come here just to simply thank the Correspondents Association for caring about the United Nations, for caring about its work, for knowing about its work, for realizing that in historical terms we have no alternative to the UN.

Yes, we shall always try to reform it. Yes, we should always make it better. Yes, you should hold its feet to the fire. But you know as well as I do that in an interdependent world someone has to be there to pick up the pieces when people's lives are broken, to pull things together, and to keep pushing forward. I am grateful. I like to give a little talk around America where I say the biggest problem with citizenship today is trying to distinguish between a story that represents just a headline and one that represents a trend line, one that tells us where the world is going and needs to go. The UN itself is a big trend line.

The new Secretary General will have a lot of headaches early on in office. Kofi will go to Geneva and send him aspirin. One of them is Darfur. It is a horrible, gripping, personal tragedy, but it shows you why there is no alternative to the United Nations in an interdependent world. From the very beginning, the UN always had tensions between the national interests of the Security Council members and the General Assembly at large and the evident responsibility that an international organization devoted to peace and humanitarianism should pursue.

Darfur is the latest example of that, and it raises a lot of questions for all of you. Would it be better if we had a permanent UN peacekeeping force? Should there at least be allocations from each country where all countries with substantial militaries say, "In any given year I will commit this many?" Should there be joint training exercises? How do you deal with, openly and honestly, conflicting national interests and global responsibilities, particularly those of the Security Council members? What's a legitimate reason for exercising a veto and what isn't? How, under any circumstances, if you know that innocent people are dying in large numbers, can they be permitted to do so?

There's been some break in the ice of the Darfur stalemate in the last couple of weeks, and I hope it will get better. I believe in this new century, we'll have to keep broadening the reach of the UN, not shrinking it. We'll have to keep figuring out a way to make it more effective and not less important to our lives.

The work that I was privileged to do with the tsunami is an example of that. I was so honored to be part of this group of people, including those who had worked with me. First, Erskine Bowles, who is now the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina, and now Eric Schwartz, Robert Piper, Sheba Crocker, and lot of the fulltime people at the UN who were loaned to me, I suppose probably reluctantly, under the Secretary-General's mandate.

I saw the UN in a specific circumstance, the worst natural disaster in history, undertake an effort at performance and reform at the same time. We had agencies working together on the ground with a level of cooperation that we'd never seen before, because they knew people's lives depended on it.

I've just returned from my last trip to the region as the UN Special Envoy. We said we would try to build back better. I went to Cuddalore, India, and saw the best example of that. They let all the people who lost their homes design and approve the new community in which they would live and the new buildings in which they would live, as long as they met national standards for safety.

One hundred percent of the people who were displaced by the tsunami are living in better housing than they were before the storm hit, with better sanitation, with better public facilities including a playground and a library. They even have a weight room for the fisherman to keep strong.

They designed one community building as a silo structure so that it could better withstand both tsunamis and cyclones. They have a regional warning system and they did a drill for me. A siren goes off in the community, then the people in charge of warning everyone run to the public building and get their bullhorns, and then they run down designated streets telling people specifically what is about to happen and what they should do. I saw the drill for people to come into the storm shelter. It was immensely moving. They have built back better, and the UN agencies helped them to do that.

In Thailand, I saw a community of sea gypsies who were still living in temporary housing but building permanent housing right up against a mangrove forest. They still have some difficulties, but their life has always been the sea. They understand something that some people forgot before the tsunami, which is that you take down natural wetlands at your peril. If you really want an early warning system and a disaster mitigation system, then the natural environment has to be part of it. The sea gypsies and I planted another mangrove tree symbolically for the global mangrove initiative that has come out of this united effort. It's something that I ask all of you who cover these things to be sensitive to.

On Hurricane Katrina, we have now seen studies saying that if the wetlands south of New Orleans had not been taken down in the last thirty years, the water in the levees and the metal walls would have gone half as fast, provided half as much pressure, and maybe the whole thing would have held and none of it would have happened. You should be proud of the fact that people working for the UN are out there working on that.

In Aceh, on the trip before this one, I saw a wonderful school being operated by UNICEF -- thank you, Ann Veneman -- where they were doing something I started doing back in 2000. They were actually offering food to children, but they had to come to school to get it. They had people leaving their other villages where the schools hadn't yet been opened to go to school with their parents' support. This is very important, because while we've got 90 percent of the health facilities that were restored back up and running, we probably only have about half the schools. It just takes a lot of time to build them.

I saw the UN doing all of this. Are there problems? Yes, there are. The problems are largely twofold. One is that the United Nations, even with all the goodwill and good organization and money in the world, can't reach the areas that have been put at risk now, because of the recurrence of trouble in Sri Lanka. What I had hoped would happen there was that the troubles would be more likely to be resolved because of the common suffering of the tsunami. That, in fact, happened in Aceh. I just met with all the leaders, who had been fighting with each other for years and years. We were standing in the middle of a puddle of water -- it's the rainy season there -- but they're happy because they're not fighting. They think that together they can make a new future.

But we’ve got a problem in Aceh, a problem with the size and the sheer magnitude of the work that has to be done. I ask you to keep writing about it. Don't let the world forget about it, because to do so would dishonor the suffering and the massive scale of death that occurred there. To do so would also undermine the work that's being done to set up early-warning systems and make sure we mitigate any future disasters, because there will be more. The changing of the climate mandates further severe weather events.

The last thing I want to say is that we are really learning some things here. You should be proud of the UN agencies, and you should be proud of the vigilant press. This is the most transparent disaster relief effort I have ever seen. In many places where I went, people I knew personally would say, "You know, we’ve never had this much money come in this quick, and we never spent it this honestly and this effectively before." This is a good thing. Were there occasional problems? Yes, but it was a transparent process.

Secondly, it was a process that reflected the empowerment of communities, with the UN, and other agencies in the NGO community in a support role. Thirdly, we actually did succeed in building back better in many places. We did not succeed in repealing the laws of physics, chemistry, or economics, so there is still a lot to do. Most of the problems of Aceh are in the lot-to-do category. There are still people there living now in old military-style barracks -- old compared to the permanent housing and the better temporary housing. They're suffering. They're there because they never owned anything in the first place.

That's the last thing I'd like to ask you to cover. They never had anything in the first place. They were renters or squatters, and they're harder to place. In Cuddalore, in India, the local people decided that now that they had restored all the people who've been displaced by the tsunami, they would go and get the dalits and the other really poor people with no place to live and give them exactly the same opportunities.

In other words, they used the suffering of the tsunami to open their eyes to the suffering of their neighbors who were not destroyed by the tsunami, and they created a more just, equitable society, and a more effective system of government. They enabled all of us to do whatever it was we were doing better. These kinds of stories may never grab the headlines, but they better reflect the trend lines of the interdependent world.

Finally, let me just say working with the United Nations has been a joy. I thought I knew a lot about everything related to public policy after I left the White House, but I didn't know nearly as much about the United Nations as I do now, about how many gifted people there are here working from all over the world. I'm very grateful to the ones who worked for me.

I also want to say one more time that I believe Kofi Annan's tenure has been historic. I believe he has been a great Secretary-General. From his efforts for peace, peacekeeping, and peace building to the Millennium Development Goals, which I am trying to find a way to implement in several countries around the world, to the creation of the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria, without which I could not do much of the work I do around the world. He's changed the lives of millions of people and helped to make the UN not just a seat of advocacy, but a place of action where people's lives are changed for the better.

I think he has left Mr. Ban Ki-Moon a better organization to work with, a broader mandate, and a broader field on which to operate. He has done it all with an enormous amount of dignity and honor with his wonderful wife. They have graced our lives, and we will never forget the gifts they gave, not only to us but to the larger world.

I had a wonderful lunch with Secretary General Annan not very long ago in which I was able to assure him that there is, in fact, life after office. Alas, there is not idleness after office for people with a conscience. You have been a leader with a great conscience, a great heart, a great mind, and a great vision.

We are fortunate to live in a world where private citizens can do public good on a more sweeping scale than ever before. You two are about to find, as I did, that your work has just begun.

Thank you and God bless you.