I remember reading this article,
and both Bill and I were like, how can this be?
How can it be that half a million children
in 1997, in the year that we were living in then,
how can it be that they are dying of diarrhea?
We'd already been to Africa together
for the very first time while we were engaged,
and then it wasn't, you know, it was only a few years later
that we had, two years later, that we had our daughter,
Jen, and I think us trying to imagine,
okay, we're raising this little girl
that we care so much about,
and what if we were in Africa,
and there were no drugs?
Like, what would we do?
And holding that child in your arms,
you start to realize that all parents care
about their children in the same way.
20 million children were dying in the developing world,
and most of those deaths when you started to look at
the data were needless deaths.
If we have tools and resources that can help them
that we just readily use here in the United States
or in England or Japan, why shouldn't they have them, too?
Being in the developing world and seeing the life,
and hearing people's stories, it opens your heart,
and then you come home, and you start to use your head
to figure out, okay, what are the numbers
behind this?
What has worked?
Why are there gaps?
What has not worked?
Well, these are the number of deaths of children
under the age of five,
and it shows the incredible decline in childhood deaths
from 1990, 11 million children dying,
to today, that number's down to five million children
dying a year.
Now, five million is still far too many kids dying.
Most of these deaths happened in the developing world.
Most of these deaths are preventable.
But to know that the world in that span of time
from 1990 to 2016 can cut childhood deaths in half
makes me incredibly optimistic that we will cut that
number in half yet again.
Conversely, if we don't keep doing the delivery,
we don't keep putting the resources in as a world,
the foreign aid money,
those number of childhood deaths won't go down,
won't be cut in half.
It'll only be cut by about basically a third.
And so it lies in our hands to decide
how much are we gonna put resources into saving children?
How much do we value the children of the world?
And if we make the right investments,
we can do the right thing and save more children.
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