This article proves how much I admire Bono!

[sparkys girl]

great article! thanks for posting it!

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Is it getting hot in here or is it just ADAM??
*+*MaRiA*+*

 

[Sherry Darling]

Originally posted by sulawesigirl4:
Wow. Bono is not only caring but also intelligent about the issues. Maybe real change is starting to happen! Makes me excited at the prospect of the Peace Corps maybe stationing me in Africa.

I spent some time in Zimbabwe with the Peace Corps and it was the most amazing thing I've done. (Yet.) Good luck! <doitdoitdoit

)

SD

 

[hotpepper]

Originally posted by sulawesigirl4:
Wow. Bono is not only caring but also intelligent about the issues. Maybe real change is starting to happen! Makes me excited at the prospect of the Peace Corps maybe stationing me in Africa.

You're joining the Peace Corps? I admire you and Bono!

 

[Foadie]

Sherry, thats so cool that you are with the Peace Corps! The scariest and the coolest thing I ever did was go to Afganhistan with the NYC Peace Corps and help some women there. It was amazing.

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The Proud Owner of the ONLY Cardboard Larry!!!

Hallelujah heavens white rose....with tears on her petals, meets Hell's black flower with blood on his thorns.

Salt, sweat, sugar on the asphalt, our hearts littering the topsoil...
Started my rock 'n roll fantasy... I'd sing to you just one more time,
A song for a heart so big,
god wouldn't let it live,
On sleepless roads the sleepless go. ~Jimmy Eat World

 

[sulawesigirl4]

Originally posted by Sherry Darling:
I spent some time in Zimbabwe with the Peace Corps and it was the most amazing thing I've done. (Yet.) Good luck! <doitdoitdoit

)

Well, I'm done with the application and the interview. Just waiting for my references to come in and for the Corps to tell me if I'm nominated or not. *crossing fingers*

 

[Liesje]

omd...Bono is so smart! I have a headache and I joost skimmed the article...

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"I retain the right to act like a hormonal teenager because i am one!!!" ~~~ Laura

AIM: Rattle n Hum 02

peace out \\//

 

[ZooGrl]

Ahhh.. I've got Allafrica.com set as my homepage, it was such a nice surprise to see Bono pop up as soon as i connected to the net!

Here's the photo that went with the article...

Foadie, Sula, Sherry, you guys ROCK---- I'm not sure that Canadians can join the Peace Corps but as soon as I finish university, maybe even before, I've decided to go to Africa to volunteer, it's been something I've wanted to do since I was young and it seems that slowly but surely things are leading me in that direction.

 

[oktobergirl]

Go here. I'm just blown away........

http://allafrica.com/

 

[oktobergirl]

maybe this will make it easier...

Rock Star Bono, US Treasury Secretary Plan
Africa Tour

allAfrica.com
INTERVIEW
May 16, 2002
Posted to the web May 16, 2002

Charles Cobb Jr.
Washington, DC

They are an unlikely duo, to say the least: Irish rock star
Bono, of U2, and Bush Administration Treasury Secretary,
Paul O'Neill. But the two men are pairing up and between
May 20-31st will travel to four sub-Saharan African nations.
They will visit schools, HIV/Aids clinics and various
development projects. The idea for the tour grew out of an
initial meeting in O'Neill's office last year. At first resistant
to meeting Bono, O'Neill agreed to give him 30 minutes.
Their talk lasted an hour and a half. O'Neill later said he
had been impressed by the rock star's knowledge and
commitment.

Bono's interest and concern with Africa dates back to 1984
when he and his group performed in the Live Aid concert to
help raise money for famine relief in Africa. Afterward, he
and his wife spent six weeks working in an Ethiopian
orphanage. To focus public attention on issues confronting
Africa he has founded an organization: Debt, Aid, Trade for
Africa (DATA). AllAfrica's Charles Cobb Jr. spoke with Bono
about his upcoming trip. Excerpts:

You're going off to Africa with Secretary Paul O'Neill,
so I'd be interested to know what you're hoping to
accomplish. And why with Secretary O'Neill? You have
to admit, it is an unusual hook-up, prominent
musician/rock star and the Secretary of the Treasury of
the United States.

Well, I had a very good relationship with the last Secretary of the
Treasury, Lawrence Summers, now the President of Harvard, and I
had a very good relationship with the Clinton Administration. But I
didn't know if we would be able to have the same access and
confidence with the new administration. Secretary O'Neill is a tough
guy, that's why they put him in that job, and he actually (laughs), he
resisted meeting me. I really had to doorstep and eventually he
surrendered and we got on very well.

Why do you think he resisted meeting you?

He didn't know what to do with this Bono guy. He had some
experience working in Africa and I think he just wanted to make sure
that I wasn't a bullshitter, so he turned it into a guarded relationship
with me. But I was struck by his knowledge of Africa and his
determination to make some progress there. I thought we could work
with that.

So the trip to Africa together came out of that. I said, 'well I can show
you places where say, debt cancellation has worked very well.
Uganda, where there's three times the amount of children enrolled in
school as a result of money freed up from debt cancellation. Or, again
in Uganda, how they're controlling the Aids emergency, Senegal ...'

I wanted to show him that there are people in Africa who really have
great programs going and are very badly under-funded.

When did you first meet him, persuade him of this?

I think it must have been late last year.

Did you propose the trip or had he already been
thinking about making a trip to Africa?

I said I would show him. It was a throw down. I didn't expect him to take
up the gauntlet and say, 'Okay. I'll do that.' And I'm very impressed by
the time and energy that the Treasury has put into this.

I think it's coming also from the President. I think he is getting a lot of
questions from faith-based communities in the United States who
have been - I could kindly put it - asleep on the issue of particularly,
Aids, the Aids emergency in the continent of Africa, but are waking up,
and we've had many meetings with them.

And I think Laura Bush, the First Lady, seems to be very interested in
this issue and particularly mother-to-child transmissions which is just -
when there are drugs like Nevarapine around - it's just inexcusable that
there isn't money to fund that.

And I also, when I'm speaking with the President, or when I'm speaking
with anyone I meet in the administration and in Congress, I always talk
about my trips to Africa where I'm meeting Aids workers who
themselves have HIV and cannot afford the dollar a day to get the
anti-retrovirals and I just say, these are the fireman running up the
burning building. These are the heroes. These are the people actually
working in their communities trying to get the message out about safe
sex et cetera, and they're not getting access to the drugs. How can you
justify this in the 21st century?

And most people, their jaws drop and they start staring at their feet.

Would it be fair, then, to say that Aids is at the center of
this trip?

No, we have a sort of an agenda that we call the 'DATA agenda,'
Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa. We think that three of the biggest issues
facing Africa are debt and the burden of old debt, Aids and how it's
setting back development, and trade, that there's not a level playing
field, that Africa's not allowed to sell a lot of its products to Europe and
America. This is scandalous! And when you have the United States as
this great light of free-market thinking, it's just shocking that subsidies
are preventing Africa from trading with the United States.

We also say that there's another side to the 'data agenda', which is
democracy, accountability, transparency in Africa, because we can't
get these monies, we can't get these deals whilst the corruption is at
the present level. And the word that we have formed with that from civil
society is, make sure that debt cancellation is tied with strong
conditions and that's what we're doing.

What could be used as a yardstick for measuring the
success of this particular trip? What would you
consider, at the end of it, a successful trip?

I think if we can convince a tough guy like Secretary O'Neill that there
are effective programs to fight the Aids emergency, that there are
health and education initiatives in various countries like in Ghana. That
there is stuff to get excited about. In Uganda, there's stuff to get
excited about. In Ethiopia...

I think if he starts to see that American tax dollars can do good work in
Africa. I think we can up the percentage of GDP, the per head
contribution of Americans, which is low. It's at the bottom among some
20 donor nations.

Now we've already had some success in talking the administration
into an increase in foreign assistance earlier in the year. They've
upped it, I think, five million starting in the '04 budget and they're ready
to move up, but not to the level that we really needed to deal with the
real problems and especially in the light of Aids.

I think there was a commitment made by the wealthy nations of the
North, like 25 years ago, to move their foreign assistance from their
average of 0.3 or 0.4 per cent of GDP up to 0.7, and rather the
opposite happened. The United States has given less than 0.1
percent, as you know, and, I think, in order to achieve the millennium
goals of halving global poverty by 2015, they are going to have to get
there. It may take seven years. It may take ten years, but that's where
they've got to go. We want to have a few steps toward this taken by the
end of this year.

Have you persuaded Secretary O'Neill of this?

No, but he's coming on this trip to Africa. It's an amazing thing. I mean
they were very inclusive in discussing the details of the visit, where we
should go and I'm not riding in his entourage, you know. We have - the
people I work with - contributed to the design of the trip.

Congress, just today, there was a bill dropped by Senators Frist and
Kerry to increase the '03 budget to increase assistance by US$2.5
billion. This is real movement. This is hard to do. Over the years it's
been very difficult to get peoples' attention. I think September 11 has
made the world feel a lot smaller for Americans because even though
they are a continent, they often act like an island. And I think they're
very aware of how interconnected they all are and, whether we like it or
not, the state of Africa will affect Europe and America. If you don't put
the Aids emergency under control it will cost much more down the
road.

It's an absurdity that I have the ear of this man and the other people
and the President, but I want to use it to do more than whisper the
conversations I hear in Africa. I want the African voices to be heard
and not the Irish rocker voice.

Which leads me to an inevitable question: How does
an Irish rock star become interested in Africa?

It's an anomaly. I think it's probably - if there is such a thing as folk
memory - a sense that our country had a famine in the middle of the
19th century that halved our population, that two million died and two
million went off to become policemen and priests in New York.

I think, also, it's from a sense of having come out from under the hoof
of colonialism and having recently turned around our economy. And
this is the kind of good news from an Irishman that helps meeting with
finance ministers in Africa. They've so much to deal with, and it's not
really comparable, but I do say, you know our country is now one of the
most prosperous economies in Europe, but twenty years ago it was in
the toilet and we were being bullied and it is possible to turn these
things around, you know, if we can just apply the minds to do the job.

Would you say something about your itinerary - where
are you going and who are you seeing?

I think the first stop is Ghana, I was there a few months ago. It's not a
great example of debt cancellation It came into that HIPC framework a
bit late but there's reason to be kind of encouraged by some of the
things they're doing there.

Then we go to South Africa and then on to Uganda and Ethiopia. The
thrilling thing about Uganda is that three times the amount of people
are going to school. Two times the amount of children are going to
school from where before they had debt cancellation. Just showing
that to Secretary O'Neill, well I think that he's going to be very
impressed. And also, President Museveni has a lot of success
withstanding the Aids crisis, and I think that's something he's quite
keen to look at.

How long will it take?

Then on to Ethiopia. Just under two weeks.

And how will you follow up, finally? And by that I really
mean, follow up with the Secretary? I know you're
setting up an office here.

Yeah, we're setting up an office. I think this administration likes things
to be a bit more formal than we have the resources for so we've asked
Bill Gates to help us out at an office end, and George Soros, another
person who's very involved in these issues, and we're going to put on
suits and ties and take our movement - which essentially started in the
streets around the G8 summit and just the noisy protest of students'
unions and, indeed, mother's unions on that issue - into the sort of
boring boardroom and boa hat and briefcase... anything to get the job
done.

I really love Africa and I think it has extraordinary potential and there's
a lot in the past that hasn't really been dealt with, resolved, and in the
present there's still a lot of problems with corruption. And where there
is new leadership, new and honest leadership, and clear and
transparent process, I am sure we can get the support of the United
States and Europe in a way that we have not seen before for decades
and that's the job at hand.

 

[sulawesigirl4]

Wow. Bono is not only caring but also intelligent about the issues. Maybe real change is starting to happen! Makes me excited at the prospect of the Peace Corps maybe stationing me in Africa.

 

[oliveu2cm]

That's great, thanks!!

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Took you to a place now you can't get back

*U2 Take Me Higher*