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August in Africa- Blog I  (no comments)

Posted by: Michael Leavitt
Thursday, August 14th, 2008

I will be spending the next several days in Africa, visiting Ethiopia, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire. My primary purpose of the trip is to look, first hand, at the way our HIV/AIDS money is being spent. I will also be giving some diplomacy speeches and meeting with officials of the government and civil society in each country. I am joined on the trip by Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Admiral Tim Ziemer, who heads the President’s Malaria Initiative.

Our travel plan included a stop overnight in the Azores. These are nine small islands populated by about 250,000 people and located about 900 miles off the coast of Portugal. It is a charming place. During our approach to land at Lajes Field, a base operated jointly by the United States and Portugal, you could see miles of stone hedges separating fields. The hedges are built as a practical means of subdividing the land, and are also a way to use the rocks gathered from the fields, making the fields easier to cultivate. Hedge-building must be an art-form passed from generation to generation. The hedges are remarkably sturdy, yet built without mortar.

The visit to the Azores turned out to be an unexpected bonus to the trip. It is always gratifying to see the U.S. military at work. Colonel Jack Briggs is the Wing commander and senior U.S. officer. There are about 1,000 U.S. personnel and the same number from Portugal who operate the facility.

The base has four primary purposes: facilitating equipment that is being shipped to and from the United States and various theaters (the base is a giant gas station for planes), maintaining the global communications gear necessary to communicate while in the region, training and readiness of troops, and finally enhancing the relationship with Portugal.

We were hosted for dinner by Colonel Briggs’ team and the two most senior Portuguese officers on the base. The dinner illustrated the unique nature of the working relationship between our two nations on the base. In the small world category, the Vice Commander on the U.S. side, Colonel Paul Suarez, was the brother of a former colleague of mine at the Environmental Protection Agency.

After dinner, we drove to a town just a few miles away and walked through a festival that reminded me a lot of a county fair in the United States, except everybody spoke Portuguese. Aside from the somewhat isolated nature of the Azores, it seemed like a peaceful and graceful place to live.