Spoken from the Heart (67 page)

On the evening of June 5, George and I landed in Heiligendamm, Germany, site of the country's oldest seaside spa, nestled on the coast of the Baltic Sea, for the G8 Summit. I arrived and began my events, but by the afternoon of the seventh, I could barely stand up. My head inexplicably throbbed; I was horribly dizzy and nauseated. I went to bed, pulled up the covers, and for several hours felt so awful that I thought I might die right there in that hotel room.

I was not the only one to fall ill. Over the next day nearly a dozen members of our delegation were stricken, even George, who started to feel sick during an early morning staff briefing. For most of us, the primary symptoms were nausea or dizziness, but one of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear. Exceedingly alarmed, the Secret Service went on full alert, combing the resort for potential poisons. In the past year, there had been several high-profile poisonings, including one with suspected nuclear material, in and around Europe. The overriding fear was that terrorists had gotten control of a dangerous substance and planted it at the resort.

After my stay in bed, I managed to get up and return to the summit. George, who almost never gets sick, refused to postpone a meeting with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, but he canceled a press conference and remained in his room to rest during the G8's final morning meeting. Indeed, George felt so ill that he met with Sarkozy in his hotel room and did not even stand up to greet him. Sarkozy walked over to the sofa to shake his hand and then sat nearby. The White House press office announced to the media that the president had contracted some kind of virus or stomach flu. European papers began scrutinizing every meal that George had eaten and even examined the Baltic fish that had been served.

We all recovered, although a few of the staff had lingering aftereffects; our military aide's gait has never returned to normal, nor has our senior staffer regained full hearing in that ear. The most concrete conclusion any doctors could reach was that we contracted a virus that attacks a nerve near the inner ear and is prevalent in Heiligendamm. But we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one.

Later in June, I returned to Africa, to follow the progress of the President's Malaria Initiative and our work to combat AIDS through PEPFAR. Jenna came with me. She had just spent the better part of a year working with UNICEF in Central America, where she had met an AIDS orphan who she called Ana, a young woman who had suffered the trauma of contracting HIV/AIDS from her mother at birth and then lost both parents to the disease. As a teenager, Ana was sexually abused in her grandmother's home. Jenna had been so moved by Ana's determination to build a new life for herself that she asked to write a book about her,
Ana's Story
.

In Zambia, Jenna and I glimpsed the widespread consequences of AIDS. Together we toured the Mututa Memorial Center, founded by Martha Chilufya, whose husband had died from AIDS. Mututa, whose name means "drumming" in the Bemba language, provides home-based care for some 150 Zambians living with AIDS. We sat in brilliant sunshine on the hot red earth, surrounded by baby dolls and bicycles. World Bicycle Relief had donated 23,000 bicycles to nonprofits in Zambia so that caregivers can ride through villages and out to the countryside to deliver medicines and check on neighbors. Some of these men and women on bicycles had gone to their neighbors' houses and found them in bed, half dead from the ravages of AIDS. They would get them up, get them to a clinic, and get them started on antiretrovirals for another chance at life. As we sat in a circle listening to their stories, two girls told us about how they had each been victims of sexual abuse and were now HIV-positive. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they spoke. Afterward, Jenna went over, took their hands, and said, "You are not alone. This story happens all over the world," and she told them about Ana. I added that Jenna had just written a book about this young woman. They raised their faces to ours and then they said, "I wish you would tell our stories. Write about us."

Since 2002 I had been following the repressive Burmese junta and its harsh treatment of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Elsie Walker, George's cousin and my good friend, who had once worked for the Dalai Lama, was a longtime advocate for Burmese human rights.

The Burmese are a tragic example of a people striving for democracy and being cruelly denied. The brutality of Burma's current military regime is even more ironic because the inhabitants of one of the earliest kingdoms there, the Pyu, eschewed war and jails and even, as legend has it, would not wear silk because they did not want to harm the silkworms. Like the ancient kingdoms of central Asia, Burma was invaded and conquered by the Mongols, and it too felt the reach of imperial Britain. The first Anglo-Burmese War was the longest and most expensive in the history of the British Indian Empire. By 1885 Britain had annexed the entire kingdom and the Burmese king had been forced into exile in India. The Japanese invaded Burma during World War II, and late in the war, the Burmese joined with the British to oust Japan from their soil. Burma gained its official independence in 1948, but it was marked by internal strife. A coup in 1962 placed it under control of the military. The military maintained power, despite repeated protests, until a 1990 election, which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won in a landslide.

The junta placed her under house arrest, nullified the election, and would not allow the National Assembly to be convened. Although she was eventually allowed to move about Rangoon, Suu Kyi was returned to house arrest in 2000 and again in 2003.

While I was in the White House, some of what I did to aid the Burmese had to be done in secret. But by the fall of 2006, I could no longer remain publicly silent. To coincide with the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in September of 2006, I convened a roundtable at the UN to address the deteriorating situation in Burma. While the United Nations uses "Myanmar," the word that the junta has selected to rename the country, for the meeting I sat under a map inscribed with the traditional name, "Burma." As in Iraq and other nations, in Burma rape is routinely used as a weapon of war. The day of the roundtable, we heard stories of the victims. Among the oldest to be raped by government forces was a woman of eighty; the youngest was a girl of eight.

I followed that conference with op-eds in major newspapers and several meetings with the UN's special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, and my office participated in the weekly White House meeting on Burma. In May I joined the Senate Women's Caucus, comprising all the female senators, and we publicly appealed for Aung San Suu Kyi's release. In June I met with Burmese exiles and refugees at the White House. By August, Burma was dominating international headlines because of the government's brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks who had peacefully taken to the streets to protest soaring prices for fuel and other basic goods. The government responded with beatings and arrests. Here and abroad, the usual round of diplomatic protests were launched, but it was not enough. I decided to speak out.

I telephoned the new UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and asked him to denounce the junta's crackdown. I called for a new UN Security Council resolution against the regime, even though China and Russia had vetoed similar U.S. efforts just eight months before. Determined to help mobilize public opinion, I sent testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote another op-ed for
The Wall Street Journal,
and gave interviews. The U.S. government imposed new sanctions, including sanctions aimed at the junta generals' personal wealth. I wanted the people inside Burma to know that we heard them, and the junta to know it too. Things might not change, but that is no excuse for not speaking out when the need and the opportunity arise.

On September 20, I hosted a tea at the White House. It was a special tea for what was called the First Lady's Prayer Group. The group had begun in 1993, as Hillary Clinton was entering the White House. The idea had come from Susan Baker, Jim Baker's wife, who was very close to Barbara and George Bush and was dismayed when they lost their bid for reelection. Susan already belonged to a Christian prayer group that met each week and included women of all political backgrounds, including Janet Hall, wife of former Democratic congressman Tony Hall, and Holly Leachman, wife of a Washington Redskins chaplain who herself was a lay minister at the McLean Bible Church. Among the other members were Carolyn Wolf, wife of Republican congressman Frank Wolf, and Joanne Kemp, wife of former congressman Jack Kemp, whose husband would run for vice president against Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1996. Grace Nelson, wife of Democratic Florida senator Bill Nelson, also joined. To assuage her disappointment over the 1992 race, Susan suggested that her prayer group begin to pray for the new first lady, and they soon became known as the First Lady's Prayer Group. Hillary Clinton met with them occasionally. When George and I moved to Washington, they began to pray for me and each week would send their prayers and Bible passages to my office for encouragement. Many of these women became my good friends.

They were far from the only ones who prayed for the first lady and the president. George has long said that the United States is a remarkable nation, maybe the only nation on earth where so many people pray for their president. We knew that people were praying for us, and we were raised up by their compassion. We are grateful for those millions of anonymous prayers.