Name: How a trip to Africa changed the world
Uploaded: 2015-05-21
Duration: 4 min 8 s
Description: Melinda Gates talks about her first trip to Africa and the origins of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

You took your first trip to Africa when you guys were engaged, right ?>> Uh hm .>> Describe that .>> Yeah, we'd had the trip planned and then we got engaged in March, and we went in September. We took about five, four or five other couples with us. The whole goal of the trip, was we'd never been to Africa and we wanted to go do a Safari. And it was the most time Bill had ever taken off from work, and we did an amazing safari. Loved the animals, We loved the savanna. But you couldn't help but be touched by the people. And you couldn't help, at least for us, to start asking questions. Like why is it that, we were in then what was Zaire. It's now Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why is that we were seeing whole towns just sort of boarded up and shut down? That there used to be store fronts there. Like what had happened here? And why when we would be driving on one of the few paved roads, we'd see all these people walking to this open air market. But it was just everybody in our car. The men and the women were just struck by the fact that the men had on flip flops and were often smoking. And the women often have a huge pile of something on their head they were carrying to market. And either baby in their belly or one on their back. And we kept saying well why is that? And then on very late in the trip their was actually [ UNKNOWN ] who actually stayed back in the tent in camp. Which was unusual, but the rest of our group went up to see the Masai. And were up in their village for a good part of the day. And I went in one of the huts where the women cooking. And the smoke is just overwhelming. I could hardly stay in it. And we stayed up in this village for quite some time, and it was really amazing to learn about their lives, et cetera. And at the end, one of the young men asked our group as an honor. He said, would you come back in a few weeks? My sisters were gonna have a cutting ceremony for my sister. And we were all devastated. And it made me realize that I knew nothing. I knew absolutely Absolutely nothing about that culture. And so I would say it started Bill and I on a series of kind of a learning journey. We always knew we would do philanthropy but Bill always said it'd be in his 60's. He's not 60 yet, he will be this year. But it started us on a series of learning journey and questions. Yeah, in Jerusalem- So, when you came back, and between that and starting the Gates Foundation, what did you do? What was your journey during those years, growing out of the Africa trip? So, after the Africa trip, it wasn't too long there after, we asked Bill's dad, Bill's mom passed away shortly after we were married, and- Juvenile with cancer for that year. And we asked Bill's dad whether he would be interested in just starting, we were getting so many letters from people asking for donations, and we asked Bill's dad would he be willing to help us with that. And he said he certainly would. And we started to work on just kind of a series of questions we had, and he would put together groups to help us learn about things. I think one of the things that really struck Bil Amuse was we read an article, in front of the New York Times one day on a Sunday. We looked at the article and we just said, " How is it that so many children, over half a million children, are dying of diarrhea" We're like, " In our country, don't you just go down to the pharmacy and get something to take care of it. Over the counter How could have more than half a million kids be dying a year of something like that? We sent a question actually to Bill's dad and said, can you help us learn more about this. And he pulled a group together for us to teach us about vaccines and what had happened in that system and not. And also to start thinking, he pulled a group together to help us start thinking a little bit else about family planning early on. Those were two areas we were interested in. And so we kind of started on a series of learning journey. And we also started to say to ourselves well how have foundations throughout history, what has been their role in terms of helping with kind of world issues? And so we started learning about those things.

How a trip to Africa changed the world

Melinda Gates talks about her first trip to Africa and the origins of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.