A Billion and a Half Reasons

I'm writing this post from the Super 8 Motel near LAX. After a week and a half of non-stop activity in Washington, DC, I'm on my way up the Left Coast. Flew into LA yesterday, hoping to spend a day with my friend Kelly, a fabulous entertainment writer who lives there. Found out on Monday that she had to head to London and wouldn't be around, so I'm cooling my heels here until my brother Peter's flight lands in a few hours. Then he, his friend Richard and I will drive up to San Luis Obispo, where we'll be attending my nephew James's graduation from Cal Poly tomorrow.

Soooo much going on. But it turns out the time at the Super 8 has been a blessing. It gave me a badly needed break from running myself into the ground. And it also gave me time to process one of the highlights of my time back home, attending the "Women Deliver" reproductive health conference on Monday. It was an amazing gathering of folks from all around the world who want to help improve maternal health for the vast majority of women who risk death and serious injury every time they get pregnant.

The ONLY downside of the gathering was information overload. Every hour or so, there'd be 4 or 5 concurrent sessions I wanted to attend. And I could only spend 1 full day there because there were so many other things I had to take care of (DMV, Passport Agency, yadda, yadda, yadda.) But I did manage to see Melinda Gates announce a 1.5 billion dollar grant for maternal and child health programs worldwide.

I'd never seen her speak before, and I have to say, she impressed the hell out of me. Not that I'm crying a river for billionaires, or anything, but you can't argue that most incredibly rich people get a bad rap. Thanks to the really evil types like Bernie Madoff and Kim Jong Il and most of the leaders of African nations, the average person equates extreme wealth with greed and corruption. And while I think most people know that Bill and Melinda Gates are extraordinarily generous philanthropists in the purest sense of the word, it's still kind of easy to put them in a separate category from the rest of us.

Melinda Gates struck me as a sincere, down-to-earth person who has an incredibly clear understanding of how blessed she has been in her life. She's also very connected to her power to make a difference in other people's lives. Just like I can decide to buy the pumps or the sandals, Melinda can decide whether to help tens of millions of women and children in Africa, or in Asia. Or heck, why not help them all? The scope of her power to make change literally takes my breath away.

The next few posts will be about women and power. Just some random observations about our remarkable capacity to give live and mould life and conquer life, and how I wish more of us could harness it to its fullest capacity. After attending "Women Deliver," I'm really optimistic that we're moving in the right direction. Especially with women like Melinda Gates on our team.