Our destination was Kabul University, an austere, Soviet-style concrete building that had been partly bombed out during the years of conflict. The United States had renovated it to include dorm rooms and cla.s.srooms. In the yard outside, widows were planting trees as part of a nationwide reforestation project funded by Caroline Firestone, an American philanthropist and a member of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council.

My first stop was the Women's Teacher Training Inst.i.tute, which I had helped found in 2002. The program, overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, is designed to train teachers from the rural provinces. After completing the program, they return to their provinces to train other teachers. The idea was to create a cascading effect, so that as many teachers as possible could be trained as quickly as possible and more small villages could open their own schools. That spring the inst.i.tute's first cla.s.s would be graduating. The inst.i.tute trained both men and women, but they were kept segregated, taught in separate cla.s.srooms.

When I entered the women's cla.s.sroom, the women were sitting on the floor on cushions, their backs propped against the wall and their papers spread across their laps.

The inst.i.tute had few chairs or desks. Many of the women were completely covered in blue burkas, and I was immediately struck by the sheer weight of the material. These were small women, drowning in cloth, each forming a kind of triangle on the floor, as if they were pinned to the ground. And they seemed afraid even to lift their mesh-covered eyes and peer up at me. Perhaps they were wary of looking at me in my Western pantsuit, with my uncovered face and hair. But these women were brave enough to leave their homes and come to Kabul, to live in a dorm, go to school, study, and be trained. Two Kabul University students showed me the dorm rooms where the female teachers slept on bunk beds. Without these rooms, without this program, these women would have no chance for any kind of education, no chance at all to come to Kabul.

In the men's cla.s.sroom, there were only cushions around the wall, not even a rug.

The men had short beards, and most wore shirts that hung below their knees. Two had donned Western-style blazers over top. A lone man in the corner stood and struggled to say his name in English and to welcome me to Afghanistan.

I gave a speech in the university's cafeteria and announced the establishment of two new schools, the American University of Afghanistan and the International School of Kabul, a high school. "These are more than just development projects," I said, "they also signify the bond between the American and Afghan people. They are symbols of our shared hopes and dreams for the future. That dream is of a prosperous, peaceful, and above all, a free Afghanistan, where both men and women stand upright in equality. "

A nearby room had been set up like a grand Afghan bazaar, with piles of handwoven rugs and rows of dresses on display. There were twenty booths, each showcasing goods made by women entrepreneurs, rug makers, weavers, embroiderers, and clothing makers, all microenterprise projects. The driving force behind many of these programs was a woman named Mina Sherzoy, who had escaped to California in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She had returned in 2002 following the fall of the Taliban to help her fellow countrywomen. But there were also women with no prior connection to Afghanistan. Connie Duckworth, the first female sales and trading partner at Goldman Sachs, had helped to found the Arzu rug company. "Arzu" means hope in the Dari language of Afghanistan. As an enterprise, Arzu works to preserve the traditional Afghan craft of rug weaving and pays women bonuses for high-quality workmanship. In return, Arzu weavers must agree to send their sons and daughters to school, to take literacy cla.s.ses themselves, and to receive pre-and postnatal medical care for themselves and their babies. After I had returned home, I ordered two Arzu rugs for the White House collection to place in the hallways of the residence. I purchased a third rug for the small library at our ranch, so that we might always have something created by these Afghan women.

On the grounds of Kabul University, I helped plant a tree in a new grove on what had been barren land. That cl.u.s.ter of trees is still green and growing.

Behind the scenes, Anita had been in negotiations with the Secret Service to see if I could leave the grounds of the university and go into Kabul itself. The agent in charge, Joe Clancy, finally said yes, but the outing could not last more than twenty minutes. We had to be onboard our airplane and in the sky by nightfall. We drove into the city in a convoy, along one of Kabul's major streets, and stopped in front of three little stores, cl.u.s.tered together, sharing walls. One was a bakery, with a picture of a white frosted cake and a smattering of English words on its wooden sign. Through the window I could see shelves of fluffy breads and pastries. The sidewalk in front of the shops was concrete, but just beyond, the concrete gave way to packed dust. Trash, empty bottles, and papers, carried by the wind, came to rest where the fresh concrete lip rose. Three children in a nearby house peeked out from their windows, and Therese Burch, one of my advance staff, walked over and invited them to come outside. The older boy knew a few words of English, but his younger brother and sister looked at me in silence. They wore only thin jackets, and in the chill of March, the younger children had no shoes for their feet.

I said h.e.l.lo and offered them one of the small gifts that we had brought, a kaleidoscope. I held it up to my eye and turned the tube to show them how it worked.

Their faces broke into smiles. Inside the bakery I looked at the display, and the employees insisted upon pressing a bag filled with sweet Afghan cookies into my hands.

I paid for the bag and thanked them. The pastries looked delicious, but of course, the Secret Service agents wouldn't let us eat them.

In those few minutes, I had exhausted my unscheduled off-site visit time. We piled back into the convoy and returned to the helicopters that ferried us to the Presidential Palace, where Hamid Karzai was waiting.

The palace is old and, after years of neglect, was in terrible shape. Crumbling blocks had been repainted and fresh plaster patches hid aging bullet holes in the walls. It was a stark place, several years away from even a modest garden or grounds. The inside was furnished in heavy, carved wooden pieces and old, slightly worn tapestries. Only the official meeting area, where we sat on gold-trimmed claw-foot chairs, beneath a crystal chandelier, had any look of opulence. As we talked, President Karzai's staff served us bright gla.s.ses of pomegranate juice. The Secret Service blanched as I raised my gla.s.s.

Lindsey, my a.s.sistant, rushed over to whisper that they didn't want me to drink it, so I left the beautiful gla.s.s of deep red liquid untouched; I was dying to drink that pomegranate juice.

After our meeting President Karzai walked me out of his offices and across a long, enclosed courtyard to a smaller, modern, rectangular building, made of concrete and blocks of stone. The woman who appeared in the doorway was his wife, who is so private that she is rarely seen in public. Zeenat Karzai wore a long, gray coat, and her head was tightly swathed in a full white scarf. Unlike some Muslim women, who push their scarves back above their hairlines to reveal a tantalizing bit of their dark tresses, she concealed every strand of hair. In a nod to Western ways, she clutched a gray purse in her hand as we were introduced.

Sitting beneath a painting of her husband in her living room, Dr. Karzai offered me tea. She is a trained obstetrician-gynecologist in a nation with the world's second highest mortality rate for women in childbirth. In 2005 an Afghan mother would die every half hour trying to bring a child into the world. Dr. Karzai told me of the desperate need for a maternity hospital in Kabul. The French hospital that Bernadette Chirac had discussed at the previous year's G8 Summit had yet to materialize, and Dr. Karzai pleaded for help, hoping that the United States could do more. Clasping her purse in her hand, she walked me to the door and took a few brief steps into the sunshine before retreating inside. I turned around to wave as we hurried to the helos for the thirty-minute flight back to Bagram.

At the base, in a bare prefab room with Afghan throw rugs to warm the cold floor, I listened to a briefing by Lieutenant General David Barno and Major General Jason Kamiya on provisional reconstruction and military projects. As they pointed at provincial maps, my eyes were drawn to the vast, mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reputed hiding place for Osama bin Laden and the refuge for the Taliban. Even on paper, it looked formidable. By 4:55 that afternoon, I was standing in the chow line to eat dinner with the troops in the Dragon Chow Dining Hall. We ate chicken tenders, ketchup, and broccoli under a large American flag. Sitting on one side of me was a female soldier, wearing camouflage fatigues, her sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail. These were the two worlds, burka-clad women and women in combat fatigues, now inhabiting the same dusty Afghan ground.

At 5:45 p.m., we were on board the plane, chasing the setting sun. Touchdown was at 1:45 a.m. at Andrews Air Force Base.

I had told the Afghan students that it was "an extraordinary privilege" to be with them that day. It was. It was a privilege to see Kabul and to be able to thank our troops in Bagram. But it was powerful to see with my own eyes the complete devastation in Afghanistan. As years of Soviet war and then Taliban rule had shown, it is easy and quick to destroy, and slow and hard to rebuild. I can understand the impatience of many with the halting progress made by new democracies around the world. From our vantage point, our own democracy and government may appear to have come easily. But they did not.

Thirteen years after America declared its independence, we had to completely revamp our government. And though in 1789 we started with a near perfect doc.u.ment, the Const.i.tution, it took decades, even centuries, for us to build a more perfect country. It took over seventy-five more years to achieve the abolition of slavery. It was fifty-five years after the surrender at Appomattox before women earned the right to vote and another forty-five years beyond that before real civil rights came to our own nation. Only in hindsight do we feel the onward rush of progress and think of it as inevitable and unstoppable. In the moment, it looks like something else indeed.

Two days after I returned from Kabul, Pope John Paul II died in Vatican City.

George and I, accompanied by Gampy, Bill Clinton, and Condi Rice, flew to Rome for the largest gathering of heads of state in history. In total, seventy presidents and prime ministers, four kings, and five queens gathered to mourn his pa.s.sing. Four million other mourners packed the streets around the basilica, and millions had walked past his body as it lay in state. We too went to pay our respects, kneeling at the communion rail. Before us lay the once vibrant man who had helped rally millions in Eastern Europe to the cause of freedom and the end of communist oppression, and who had worked so tirelessly on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden. No effort had been made to cover his skin, which had grown mottled with age and illness. But his was a life of devotion, a life of blessings, a life well-lived.

Throughout the funeral service, the skies threatened rain. Then, at the precise moment when John Paul's plain pine casket with a simple inlaid cross was lifted high to be seen one final time by the mourners before it was carried into the Basilica of St.

Peter's, a ray of sun broke through the clouds and shone bright upon the casket.

I thought of John Paul again the very next month as my motorcade raced along the flat desert highway leading from Jordan's main airport to the capital city of Amman, where stacked dwellings rose up the mountainsides and the colors were muted desert browns and beige. I had arrived in the region where the world's three major faiths converge, moving from Jordan to Israel to Egypt.

In Amman I ate dinner at the private residence of King Abdullah and Queen Rania, whom we had hosted a number of times in the United States, including for a weekend at Camp David. We ate at a long, rectangular wooden table, and during dinner Queen Rania excused herself to tend to her fourth child, a four-month-old baby, whose mews and cries drifted downstairs.

I was in Jordan to speak at the World Economic Forum, which was meeting at the edge of the Dead Sea. I would be addressing a large group of delegates before heading off to a smaller roundtable. As UNESCO's honorary amba.s.sador for its Decade of Literacy, I spoke about education and literacy, and while I did, a desert fly buzzed around my face, attracted to the bright spotlight of the speaker's podium. My speech proved to be a different kind of irritant to some of the attendees. The message about education and opportunity for all citizens, including women, coming from the wife of a conservative American president, was too much for some of the men. "In my country," I said, "women didn't secure the right to vote until more than a century after our nation's founding. But now we know that a nation can only achieve its best future and its brightest potential when all of its citizens, men and women, partic.i.p.ate in the government and in decision making." I continued, "I'm reminded of what V'clav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, once told me, 'Laura, you know, democracy is hard because it requires the partic.i.p.ation of all the people.'"

Below me, in the audience, there was a rustling, then a murmur, and then a delegation of white-robed men in red-checked head coverings walked out. They were from Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote and cannot drive. They are not permitted to travel freely, and many have no chance for anything beyond the most rudimentary education, if that. I spoke of how, across the broader Middle East and North Africa, more than 75 million women and 45 million men are illiterate. Then I spoke about freedom.

"As freedom becomes a fact of life for rising generations in the Middle East, young people need to grow up with a full understanding of freedom's rights and responsibilities: the right to discuss any issue in the public sphere, and the responsibility to respect other people and their opinions." I added, "Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression. It's the right to speak and vote and worship freely. Human rights require the rights of women. And human rights are empty promises without human liberty."

No one in the press reported the walkout--probably better for the delicate balancing acts of global diplomacy--but it was a clear reminder of how long the journey is for women to become men's equals in the wider world.

Afterward, I spent time with Jordan's king and queen at a roundtable with Arab youth, where we discussed education and economic improvement. Both King Abdullah and Queen Rania have charitable foundations devoted to improving lives in Jordan. I went on to nearby Mount Nebo, the last place where Moses stopped. Wearily, he ascended the mountain and glimpsed the Promised Land he would never reach. It was here that Moses died, leaving the Israelites to complete their journey alone. On clear days, from the rise, the scene is breathtaking; it is possible to see as far as Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

During the drive we pa.s.sed encampments of nomadic Bedouins, their camels kneeling on the hot sands and their tents billowing in the desert winds. The heat was so searing and Mount Nebo so steep that my limousine broke down on the journey up the winding roads. My staff and I piled into the reserve vehicle to finish the climb. Waiting for me afterward in an old stone restaurant at the base of the mountain were a group of Jordanian women leaders. Before I left, I visited a girls' school and then the Jordan River Foundation, a special project of Queen Rania's to support women through microenterprise.

As we returned along the same flat desert highway to the airport, everything was routine. Then, a second later, it was not. The vehicles in my convoy swerved, evaded, and then accelerated. Something was very wrong. A rogue car had broken into my motorcade.

In the seconds that followed, we did not know if it was a confused driver who had merely pulled out onto the road or if the people inside the vehicle knew that this was my convoy and that, in one of these vehicles, they would find me. Immediately an entire Secret Service tactical team shouldered their guns and swarmed along the windows and back hatch of an accompanying Chevy Suburban, aiming their weapons and leaning out into the rushing air. Every cell phone signal was shut down. The fear was that a phone signal could be used to detonate a remotely controlled bomb or IED hidden inside the unknown car or preplanted along the roads. The car was intercepted, and we continued on, racing to the airport at breakneck speed. I never knew from where or how, or why, that vehicle came. It was a stark reminder of the daily threats that hover over nearly everyone's lives in this part of the world.

A brief flight ferried me across the border and into Israel, to Tel Aviv. Hugging the coast of the Mediterranean, Tel Aviv is a city of glittering, modern buildings and some well-preserved old quarters, where it is still possible to imagine what life must have been like when this was a sleepy trading port centuries ago. From the air the lands of Jordan and Israel are a contrast of tightly ma.s.sed towns and cities and vaster open s.p.a.ces.

We traveled the quick distance to Jerusalem, pa.s.sing road signs for Bethlehem and Jericho. I was invited for tea with Gila Katsav, wife of the president of Israel. Israel is a beacon of democracy for the region and has had, since its founding out of the ashes of the Holocaust, a special relationship with the United States. It is one of America's staunchest allies, and the United States is in turn committed to Israel's survival.

Mrs. Katsav and Sheila Kurtzer, wife of the American amba.s.sador, accompanied me to the Western Wall, one of the holiest places in Judaism, where the faithful come to pray. It is considered the sole remnant of the Holy Temple that was destroyed by the Romans, and religious and secular Jews make pilgrimages to this site. The original structures are attributed to King David; sections of the wall have stood on this spot since nineteen years before the birth of Christ, and their stones remain today. As is custom, I covered my head in a shawl and placed a tiny note in a narrow crevice in the limestone.

On it was written a prayer for peace.

When I had arrived at the wall, there was a small group protesting for the release of Jonathan Pollard, the American civilian naval intelligence officer who pleaded guilty in 1986 to the charge of spying for Israel and was sentenced to life in prison. There were more confrontations to come.

On the hill above the Western Wall sit the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, a shrine built by the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem in 692. Its shiny gold-leaf dome reaches to the sky, and its ornate walkway of columns and mosaic art envelop the worn contours of an ancient, holy stone where the prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended to Heaven and where the Jewish patriarch Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is one of the most revered sites in the Islamic world. A visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon, when he was a candidate for Israeli prime minister in 2000, triggered a call for ma.s.s riots by the Palestinians' Hamas and Fatah organizations and formed the pretext for the Second Intifada or Palestinian uprising. Israeli police and officials, and even officials from the Palestinian Authority, are no longer permitted on the site; few non-Muslims routinely enter.

Both the dome and the Western Wall are holy places and always crowded with pilgrims. It had been decided that I would make the brief walk from the entrance to the Temple Mount to the dome itself, although in the crowds, people were pushing to get a glimpse of me. A few were worshipers who did not want me at the site, but the vast majority were paparazzi and members of the foreign press who wanted to call out questions and shoot photos. I had my Secret Service detail, but, seeing the mounting media frenzy, the Israeli security forces formed a ring around us. The security personnel brushed away anyone who came too close. Though the Israelis were not welcome beyond the gate leading to the dome, they would not allow me to enter without additional protection. I was not afraid, my Arab hosts were not afraid, but Suzanne Malveaux of CNN, who was accompanying me on the trip, was totally unnerved. In her televised report, a sixty-second walk looked like a major confrontation. The next morning she asked me if the president had been alarmed when he saw what happened. "Yes, Suzanne,"

I replied, "but only after he saw your report, on television."

I toured the beautiful holy site, which is managed by a special Muslim trust, and then drove to the ancient city of Jericho, upon whose walls Joshua's trumpets blew. Inside this Arab city, a sadly desolate place compared to the bustle of Jerusalem, I met with a group of Palestinian women. Afterward, I stopped to see one of the treasures of the Judean desert: Hisham's Palace, built in 724 by the Caliph Hisham, who ruled an empire that stretched from India to the Pyrenees. Although the palace had been damaged by an earthquake, the floor of the reception hall remained untouched. It is inlaid with the beautiful Tree of Life mosaic, depicting a pomegranate tree under which are gathered lions and gazelles. The gazelles are the visitors, coming to pay their respects and show their good wishes to the kingdom. But on the right is one gazelle that wishes the ruler harm, and so is savaged by a lion determined to protect his domain and take revenge. It was no accident that the mosaic graced a formal state receiving room. Perhaps diplomacy has changed little in thirteen centuries.

At day's end we traveled back to Jerusalem, to Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust. I had visited the memorial before, in 1998, when Barbara was spending a semester abroad in Rome. George, Jenna, and I had spent Thanksgiving with her, and then George and I had gone on to visit Israel with a group of American Jews and Christians. One was a man named David Flaum, the child of Holocaust survivors who had come to the United States. His older brother and sister, born in Europe, had perished at the hands of the n.a.z.is. Worn by years of suffering, David's mother had died when he was still young. As we entered the area that commemorates the children killed in the Holocaust, David broke down. Together George, David, and I gazed upon the lights of thousands of tiny candles, each one reflecting its image into a mirror until the reflections stretch out toward infinity. Every light represents a child lost, a living, breathing child who is no more, like the brother and the sister whom David had never known.

For a first lady, there are moments of maximum political controversy, and they often strike without warning. Mine was to come the next morning, just after we visited the Church of the Resurrection in Abu Ghosh, an Arab-Israeli town. The nuns and monks sang Psalm 150 in Hebrew, a beautiful display of voice and faith. Indeed, here in this peaceful spot, it seemed that all faiths might exist together in peace. A couple of hours later, I arrived at the Ittihadiyya Palace on the outskirts of Cairo to call on Suzanne Mubarak, first lady of Egypt. Suzanne is close to my mother-in-law. In one of my alb.u.ms, I have the official vice presidential photo of Bar showing Suzanne Jenna and Barbara's first real baby pictures, taken just a few weeks after they were born.

I had arrived two days before a nationwide referendum on future presidential elections. I had known that elections were scheduled, but in weeks of staff meetings and in my National Security Council briefing for the trip, no one had mentioned that my visit would be so close to the referendum vote. Egypt is an important U.S. ally, but it also jails political opponents. I had walked, unprepared, into a potential minefield. In retrospect, it was probably one of the worst possible times for me to be in Egypt. Right away the Egyptian and American press asked me about the upcoming vote. And while I had reams of official talking points on educational programs and compliments about cultural sites, such as the pyramids and the library at Alexandria, no one had thought to include a detailed briefing paper on current political issues in the country. I answered that holding elections was a "bold step" toward democracy, but both the referendum and the actual presidential elections that followed were later criticized as insufficiently democratic for not allowing a full slate of opposition candidates to partic.i.p.ate. Days after I left, protesters against the May referendum were beaten in the streets. And when one of Egypt's leading opposition figures, Ayman Nour, who was jailed early in 2005, strongly pet.i.tioned for a "rerun" of the presidential vote, the election commission denied his request.

I imagine that people at the NSC thought the first lady was going abroad to do cultural events and ladies' things and a.s.sumed that I would never be asked about politics.

After all, I was taping an episode of Egypt's version of Sesame Street, Alam Simsim, Sesame Street, Alam Simsim, and and visiting the Egyptian Muppet version of the grocery shop, the house and carpentry workshop, the invention corner, and the garden and library. But we had selected that event in part because 85 percent of Egypt's preschoolers and 54 percent of their mothers watch Alam Simsim Alam Simsim. An appearance there had the potential to reach more ordinary citizens than high-level summitry. Yet while I might have been better prepared, the fact is that, for all first ladies, improvisation comes with the terrain.

After the television taping, Suzanne Mubarak hosted a lunch in my honor and then we toured Abu Sir, one of Egypt's thousand "girl-friendly schools," dedicated to girls and built in 2003 in the shadow of the pyramids. From there we saw the pyramids themselves. With the press in tow, I was in the middle of a tour with Dr. Zahi Hawa.s.s, who directs the Giza pyramids excavation. He was preparing to unveil a new discovery when Jim VandeHei, then a political reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Post, elbowed his way elbowed his way to the front of the press pool, climbed onto the pyramid plateau, and began shouting out questions about the Egyptian referendum and Hosni Mubarak's political and election plans. Dr. Hawa.s.s appeared dismayed and completely taken aback to have this outburst happen in the middle of Egypt's premier historical site. It was a violation of protocol, and as far as the Egyptian antiquity experts were concerned, Jim VandeHei was part of the U.S. delegation. Sometimes members of the press forget that they are not seen as independent ent.i.ties abroad. I quietly apologized, knowing that this incident would not be attributed to an individual reporter or The Washington Post The Washington Post; it would be blamed on me and, by extension, on George.

My first solo trip to the Middle East had been a series of land mines. The Saudi walkout during my World Economic Forum speech seemed positively mild by the time I boarded the plane to return home. But these moments were fleeting, while the region's problems were far more intractable. My meetings with Israeli and Palestinian women were vivid confirmations of the often deep distrust that exists among some on both sides.

When I sat down with the Israeli women, they spoke of the horrid things said about Jews in Arab textbooks. When I sat down with Palestinian women, they lamented the security barrier that Israel was constructing along the West Bank, and how it made their lives more difficult. Each time, in their words, there was a quality of "if only." If only they would change their textbooks, if only they would take down the barrier, then we would get along. There were so many if onlys.

From my first encounter with the British tabloids, when I was dubbed a "cowgirl,"

I was fascinated to discover what parts of American culture struck a chord overseas and how other countries saw us. But I never imagined that one innocent speech I gave on a Sat.u.r.day night in a hotel in Washington, D.C., would have such a lasting impact abroad.

It was April 30, 2005, the night of the annual White House Correspondents' a.s.sociation dinner. The correspondents' dinner is the culmination of a Washington ritual of roasting the president. It begins with the Alfalfa Club in January and continues through the late winter and early spring with the Gridiron Club, the White House News Photographers a.s.sociation, and the Radio and Television Correspondents' a.s.sociation, all building up to the crescendo: the correspondents' dinner, some three thousand people gathered in black tie in the bas.e.m.e.nt ballroom at the Washington Hilton hotel. There, beneath a white cutout ceiling that looks as if it spent its previous life on the set of Star Trek, Star Trek, the the president sits and listens while comedians and members of the press crack barbed jokes about him. Then the president is expected to give his own humorous speech. As George put it, "People make fun of the president and then it is the president's turn to get up and make fun of himself." The evening's purpose is to honor members of the White House Press Corps, but news organizations also try to fill their tables with celebrities, the famous and the infamous, from all walks of life, and the evening may be the closest thing Washington, D.C., has to a glitzy Hollywood party.

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 Desperate Housewives bit. "Here's our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr. bit. "Here's our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr.

Excitement here is sound asleep, and I'm watching Desperate Housewives 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 Texas Chainsaw Ma.s.sacre and my mother-in-law to and my mother-in-law to The G.o.dfather The G.o.dfather'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 sh.o.r.es.

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 cla.s.s and their workforce, to AIDS. They were economically devastated and coping with ma.s.sive 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 Today show, who was making 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, Mitch.e.l.l 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 HIVpositive, 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 cla.s.sroom. 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 ma.s.sacres 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 pa.s.sionate 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 t.i.tle. 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 amba.s.sador'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 ma.s.s 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 "c.o.c.kroaches," 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.

Some of the most pioneering humanitarian work in Africa is being done by American religious inst.i.tutions. A special project of the organization World Relief encourages local ministers to be tested for AIDS and to share the results with their congregations. Inside a circular church with rough wooden benches, a concrete floor, and simple cream walls, Jenna and I held feverish small children with HIV on our laps as a Rwandan minister preached to the congregation. Just that year he had announced to his worshipers that he'd tested positive for HIV/AIDS. By speaking openly about his disease, he was hoping to help break the stigma and to convince them to be tested as well.

The toll from AIDS is enormous, but the numbers cannot capture the consequences. One in particular is orphan children running their own households. In Rwanda I met a girl named Tatu, who had lost her father to genocide when she was only two; her mother had died of AIDS when she was eleven. Now twelve, she was caring for three small half brothers, ages eight, six, and three. She had been abandoned a third time by an older brother, who after their mother's death had returned to the family house, sold it, and disappeared with the money. Tatu had dropped out of school to work and was hawking fruit at a market stand to provide for her younger siblings. She sobbed as she spoke, and I took her into my arms. American church groups were building a home for her and her young brothers.

Rwanda is, of necessity, a society of women. In the genocide, hundreds of thousands of men were killed. By 2005, women held nearly 50 percent of all the seats in the National a.s.sembly. Before we left, Cherie and I, accompanied by Kay Warren, wife of Reverend Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church has been active in Rwanda, attended a dinner hosted by Jeannette Kagame, Rwanda's first lady, who had been born in a Rwandan refugee camp in the Republic of Burundi and who had herself fought as a Tutsi soldier. Seated with us, amid candlelight, overflowing flower vases, and white linen tablecloths, were some of Rwanda's most prominent women. The ministers of justice, the environment, education, labor, and economic planning, as well as the head of the National AIDS Control Commission and female senators and parliamentarians, were all in attendance. At my table were leading government ministers. We talked about the many challenges facing Rwanda. At one point, I asked a simple question: How many of you have had malaria? Malaria is a debilitating and even fatal disease carried by the bites of mosquitoes: the United States eradicated it from its swamps and marshlands decades ago.

Each of the Rwandan women seated at the table answered, "Yes, of course I've had malaria." All of them had been bitten, had fallen ill, and could have died.

I have been changed by Africa on each visit, in large measure because of the tremendous hope I have seen among its people in the midst of overwhelming despair.

When George and I returned in 2008, we traveled again to Rwanda, where we stopped at a school for teenagers. Some were orphans who had lost a parent to AIDS or to genocide.

As we left the school, we saw a group of teenagers waiting outside to greet us. One had a sign, "G.o.d is Good." George nodded and said, "G.o.d is is good." And these teenage children good." And these teenage children replied, in unison, "All the time." To suffer as they have suffered, with genocide, disease, and poverty, and to still believe "G.o.d is good. All the time"!

"I Told You I Would Come"

Greeting Governor Habiba Sarabi, Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan.

(Shealah Craighead/White House photo) On Tuesday, August 23, 2005, a cl.u.s.ter of rain and thunderstorm clouds coalesced over the Bahamas into what the National Weather Service named Tropical Depression Twelve. The next day the depression became a storm, with winds above forty miles per hour. It was the eleventh tropical storm of the 2005 season, and the weather service christened it Katrina. Within twenty-four hours, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, and forecasters predicted that it would make landfall in Florida, then turn toward the Alabama-Florida panhandle. At 6:30 that night, August 25, Katrina arrived at the Dade and Broward county lines. Its winds were eighty miles per hour, its rainfall up to sixteen inches. Three people drowned as the storm hit; three others were killed by falling trees. More than 1.4 million homes and businesses lost power. Unsure of where Katrina would head next, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began positioning ice, water, and food at logistics centers in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina. Within three days the federal government would have finished the largest prepositioning of emergency a.s.sets in its history. But still, forecasters could not say with certainty where the hurricane would turn.

Katrina pa.s.sed over Florida and then reached the Gulf of Mexico, but instead of heading north, it drifted west, its winds and rains growing stronger over the warm, late summer waters of the gulf. At the end of the afternoon on August 26, weather forecasters began predicting a new path, saying that the storm would now make landfall in the Mississippi-Louisiana region. They also predicted that it would be a Category 4 or 5 storm. A Category 5 is considered a catastrophic storm, with winds in excess of 155 miles per hour. It can produce, as weather scientists clinically put it, "complete building failure" in its immediate path. There are only three Category 5 storms ever recorded in the United States; one of the worst was Hurricane Camille in 1969. When it came ash.o.r.e in Mississippi, it caused a twenty-four-foot storm tide, about one-quarter the height of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

At five in the afternoon on Sat.u.r.day, August 27, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin called for a voluntary evacuation of the city. Early on August 28, Katrina officially became a Category 5 storm.