Headline Aug30,2012/"The Art in Greatness!"

"THE ART IN GREATNESS!"

Just honour a closer glance at the flags and the stats. American Heroes have just about doubled their lead! For us and for millions of students around the world: this is an "Exceptional Testament" of a Great Nation. I thank you all for this honour! We thank you all for rising to such heights, for a situation that is physically and emotionally so distant!

If children are eating better because farmers are growing more food, it's going to imporve the health of the children. Obviously, it will take the burden off the clinics. If the children are healthy, they are going to be in school. And they are going to be learning. If the children are going to be in schools, they are going to be the ones who will bring new ideas and new technology to the community, so it's all mutually reinforcing.

So, it was in this context and perspective, that Professor Jeffrey Sachs began to assimilate facts and seek insights and inspiration. Dr Jeffrey Sachs, who then was the director of both the Earth Institute at the Columbia University and the UN Millennium Project, got picked by destiny to lead a green revolution in Africa that would help rescue the starving continent. Here he is, recalling his dream from the unreal to the real:

My colleagues and I took a stand in our work several years ago that we would not look for the magic bullet, because there is none. These are just basic problems requiring basic work. Nothing magic about it.
The strategy follows from that basic idea, but the idea of approaching this on village-by-village basis came about accidentally. Officialdom the world over is pretty slow moving , pretty impractical, and pretty darn frustrating in many ways, some even when the proofs of these concepts is clear, actually getting things done is not so easy. You need a little bit of money, and donors seem utterly capable of spending it on themselves, on salaries of consultants, on meetings and seminars and workshops, but not on actually helping people not starve to death in villages.

Too much of our Aid money goes after an emergency comes, in shipping food aid instead of helping the farmers grow food, just as too much of it goes to razing and rebuilding a city rather than fortifying levees in advance of a disaster. Think of it as a smart investment: we can pay now or pay many times over later. And it's a lot cheaper to pay now, and the return is incalculable. Yet this stuff doesn't actually get done, and that's why people are hungry, and that's why they're unable to access safe drinking water, and that's why they are dying by the millions! It's just not satisfactory to see all this suffering and happening and not act.

And so in the last couple of years I've started talking about these problems with business leaders and philanthropists, and over and over again, I have heard the same response:  Don't wait for the Government. I'll help you!" The world is just so full of great people!

Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless