比尔．盖茨夫妇2014斯坦福大学毕业演讲

MELINDA GATES: Bill called me that day after he visited the TB hospital and normally if one of us is on an international trip, we will go through our agenda for the day and who we met and where we have been.

But this call was different.

Bill said to me, Melinda, I have been somewhere that I have never been before.

And then he choked up and he couldn't go on.

And he finally just said, I will tell you more when I get home.

And I knew what he was going through because when you see people with so little hope, it breaks your heart.

But if you want to do the most, you have to go see the worst, and I've had days like that too.

About ten years ago, I traveled with a group of friends to India.

And on last day I was there, I had a meeting with a group of prostitutes and I expected to talk to them about the risk of AIDS that they were facing, but what they wanted to talk to me about was stigma.

Many of these women had been abandoned by their husbands.

That's why they even went into prostitution.

They wanted to be able to feed their children.

They were so low in the eyes of society that they could be raped and robbed and beaten by anyone, even the police, and nobody cared.

Talking to them about their lives was so moving to me, but what I remember most was how much they wanted to be touched.

They wanted to touch me and to be touched by them.

It was if physical contact somehow proved their worth.

And so before I left, we linked arms hand in hand and did a photo together.

Later that same day, I spent some time in India in a home for the dying.

I walked into a large hall and I saw rows and rows of cot and every cot was attended to except for one, that was far off in the corner.

And so I decided to go over there.

The patient who was in this room was a woman in her 30s.

And I remember her eyes.

She had these huge, brown, sorrowful eyes.

She was emaciated and on the verge of death.

Her intestines were not holding anything and so the workers had they put a pan under her bed, and cut a hole in the bottom of the bed and everything in her was just pouring out into that pan.

And I could tell that she had AIDS.

Both in the way she looked and the fact that she was off in this corner alone.

The stigma of AIDS is vicious, especially for women.

And the punishment is abandonment.

When I arrived at her cot, I suddenly felt completely and totally helpless.

I had absolutely nothing I could offer this woman.

I knew I couldn't save her.

But I didn't want her to be alone.

So I knelt down with her and I put my hand out and she reached for my hand and grabbed it and she wouldn't let it go.

I didn't speak her language and I couldn't think of what I should say to her.

And finally I just said to her, it's going to be okay.

It's going to be okay.

It's not your fault.

And after I had been with her for sometime, she started pointing to the roof top.

She clearly wanted to go up and I realized the sun was going down and what she wanted to do was go up on the roof top and see the sunset.

So the workers in this home for the dying were very busy and I said to them, you know, can we take her up on the roof top?

No. No. We have to pass out medicines.

So I waited that for that to happen and I asked another worker and they said, No no no, we are too busy.

We can't get her up there.

And so finally I just scooped this woman up in my arms.

She was nothing more than skin over bones and I took her up on the roof top, and I found one of those plastic chairs that blows over in a light breeze.

I put her there, sat her down, put a blanket over her legs and she sat there facing to the west, watching the sunset.

The workers knew -- I made sure they knew that she was up there so that they would bring her down later that evening after the sun went down and then I had to leave.

But she never left me.

I felt completely and totally inadequate in the face of this woman's death.

But sometimes, it's the people that you can't help that inspire you the most.

I knew that those sex workers I had met in the morning could be the woman that I carried upstairs later that evening.

Unless Also we found a way to defy the stigma that hung over their lives.

Over the past ten years, our Foundation has helped sex workers build support groups so they could empower one another to speak up and demand safe sex and that their clients use condoms.

Their brave efforts have helped to keep HIV prevalence low among sex workers and a lot of studies show that's the big reason why the AIDS epidemic has not exploded in India.

When these sex workers gathered together to help stop AIDS transmission, something unexpected and wonderful happened.

The community they formed became a platform for everything.

Police and others who raped and robbed them couldn't get away with it anymore.

The women set up systems to encourage savings for one another and with those savings, they were able to leave sex work.

This was all done by people that society considered the lowest of the low.