Decision Points

in the past, is now really going to be a beacon of light,” Tony said.
    The spirit of renewal at S.J. Green Charter School is present all across the Gulf Coast. With leadership from people like Tony, a new generation can build a better life than the one they inherited. And the true legacy of Katrina will be one of hope.
    * In the fall of 2006, Congress amended the Insurrection Act to allow the president to deploy federal troops with law enforcement powers during natural disasters. Then, in 2008, they repealed the amendment.

n July 30, 2008, Mohamad Kalyesubula sat in the front row of the East Room. He was a tall, trim African man. He had a big, bright smile. And he was supposed to be dead.

    Mohamad Kalyesubula in the East Room of the White House.
White House/Joyce Boghosian
    Five years earlier, Laura and I had met Mohamad in Entebbe, Uganda , at a clinic run by The AIDS Support Organization, TASO. Located in a simple one-story brick building, the TASO clinic served thousands of AIDS patients. Like most suffering the advanced stages of the disease, Mohamad was wasting away. He ate little. He battled constant fevers. He had been confined to a bed for almost a year.
    I expected TASO to be a place of abject hopelessness. But it was not. A handpainted sign over the door read “Living Positively with HIV/AIDS.” A choir of children, many of them orphans who had lost parents to AIDS, sang hymns that proclaimed their faith and hope. They ended with a sweet rendition of “America the Beautiful.” “I have a dream,” Mohamad told me from his hospital bed. “One day, I will come to the United States.”
    I left the clinic inspired. The patients reaffirmed my conviction that every life has dignity and value, because every person bears the mark of Almighty God. I saw their suffering as a challenge to the words of the Gospel: “To whom much is given, much is required.”
    America had been given a lot, and I resolved that we would answer the call. Earlier that year I had proposed, and Congress had passed, a $15 billion initiative to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, constituted the largest international health initiative to combat a specific disease. I hoped it would serve as a medical version of the Marshall Plan. “This is my country’s pledge to the people of Africa and the people of Uganda,” I said at the TASO clinic. “You are not alone in this fight. America has decided to act.”
    Three months later, Mohamad received his first antiretroviral drugs. The medicine renewed his strength. Eventually he was able to get out of bed. He took a job at the TASO clinic and earned enough money to support his six children. In the summer of 2008, we invited Mohamad to the White House to watch me sign a bill more than doubling our worldwide commitment to fight HIV/AIDS. I hardly recognized him. His shriveled body had grown robust and strong. He had returned to life.
    He was not the only one. In five years, the number of Africans receiving AIDS medicine had risen from fifty thousand to nearly three million—more than two million of them supported by PEPFAR. People who had been given up for dead were restored to healthy and productive lives. Calling to mind the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead, Africans came up with a phrase to describe the transformation. They called it the Lazarus Effect.

    In 1990, Dad asked me to lead a delegation to Gambia to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary of independence. A small West African nation with a population of about nine hundred thousand, Gambia was best known in America as the home of the forebears of Alex Haley , the author of
Roots
. Laura and I had read the Pulitzer Prize–winning book in which Haley traces his lineage back to an African man taken by slave traders in the 1700s.
    Sadly, Gambia did not seem to have developed much since then. Laura and I were driven around the capital, Banjul, in an old Chevrolet provided by the embassy. The main road was paved. The rest were dirt. Most people we saw traveled by foot, often with heavy loads on their backs. The highlight of the trip was the ceremony celebrating Gambian independence. It took place in the national stadium, where the paint was peeling and concrete was chipped away. I remember thinking that high school stadiums in West Texas were a lot more modern than Gambia’s showcase.
    Gambia was in the back of my mind eight years later when I started thinking about