A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (29 page)

I had several offers to assume an academic role, either to become president of a university or to teach, and I finally accepted an offer from Emory University to become a “distinguished professor.” I was guaranteed complete freedom of expression and would not have obligations to teach specific students for a semester and deal with their grading. My duty was to lecture to large and small numbers of students, on subjects to be decided between me and the professors and deans. My Emory duties include lecturing in different schools and departments each month during the academic year, including history, political science, environmental studies, theology, African-American studies, business, medicine, nursing, and law. My first session each September is a town hall meeting with several thousand students, where I answer their unpredictable questions. So far, I have not avoided answering a question because it might be politically or personally sensitive, and I follow the same policy in lectures to smaller groups. I have enjoyed this freedom in my academic role but sometimes create a brief flurry in the news media when I comment frankly on decisions made by public officials in America or other countries.

Rosalynn and I spend at least a week each month in Atlanta, where I work on the affairs of The Carter Center, meet with foreign leaders, enjoy supper one night with about twenty-five family members in the area, have extended discussions with a few Emory professors and deans on mutual
interests, and Rosalynn and I have breakfast with the university’s president and spouse and the CEO of The Carter Center.

My father had been fifty-nine years old when he died with pancreatic cancer, and my doctors at Emory University became concerned when, in 1983, my sister Ruth, fifty-four, died from the same cause and five years later my brother, Billy, fifty-one, suffered the same fate. The National Institutes of Health began to check all members of our family regularly, and my last remaining sibling, Gloria, sixty-four, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in 1990. There was no record of another American family having lost four members to this disease, and since that time I have had regular X-rays, CAT scans, or blood analyses, with hope of early detection if I develop the same symptoms. By the time it is detected, cancer of the pancreas has often metastasized to other vital organs and is usually fatal within a few months. A worldwide search has revealed a few other families like ours, and it is most likely that a genetic defect is involved, possibly triggered by smoking cigarettes. Being the only nonsmoker in my family may have been what led to my longer life.

My most challenging obligation was to raise about $25 million in private contributions to build a presidential library. As a defeated Democratic candidate with no prospect of returning to public office and few wealthy friends or supporters, I found this task difficult and time-consuming. I finally decided to begin construction using architectural plans we had approved and go into debt for the amount still to be raised. I was not interested in just building a museum or storing my White House records and memorabilia; I wanted a place where we could work.

I awoke one night after a few hours of sleep, called Rosalynn, and said, “I know what we can do for the future. We can create a place in Atlanta near our presidential library and museum and invite people to come there like Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin came to Camp David. I can offer my services as a mediator to help prevent or resolve conflicts, either within or between nations. If they prefer, I can go to their country.” This was the birth of The Carter Center. We expanded my concept of our Center by including conferences on important issues in which I had been involved as president, including peace in the Middle East, international security and arms control, business and the environment, education, and global health. Working with Emory, we established The Carter Center legally in 1982, and during the next five years I spent much of my time raising funds from private donors to pay for the presidential library, with adjoining buildings to house the work of the Center. Emory provided me with an office on the top floor of their library, and I began to make more specific plans with the help of Dr. Steven Hochman, who for the next year or so was my only assistant.

We adopted a few basic principles: Our Center would be nonpartisan; we would be as innovative as possible, not duplicating or competing with other organizations that were addressing issues successfully; we would not be afraid of possible failure if our goals were worthwhile; and we would operate always with a balanced budget. The Carter Center expanded its operations into eighty nations, including the promotion of peace, human rights, democracy and freedom, and better health care. We now have an annual cash budget of about $100 million with an equal amount of in-kind contributions of medicines and other supplies that are distributed in our health programs, primarily in Africa and Latin America. Our normal staff of 180 is sometimes supplemented with several hundred trained experts on our payroll plus thousands of unpaid volunteers whom we train to work on our projects in targeted countries. We have adhered to the original principles and met our goals during the past three decades, and I am still performing my duties at Emory University.

We expanded my concept of The Carter Center by including conferences on important issues in which I had been involved as president, including peace in the Middle East, international security and arms control, business and the environment, education, and global health.

The most unanticipated development has been that global health has become our largest commitment, now encompassing a majority of our employees and expenditures. We concentrate on malaria plus five “neglected tropical diseases” that are no longer known in the moderately developed world but still afflict hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Latin America: onchocerciasis (river blindness), schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis), trachoma, and dracunculiasis (guinea worm).

To initiate a project in the early years, I would go first to a country and meet with the president, prime minister, and ministers of health, transportation, education, and agriculture. I would inform them about our plans, outline what was expected of them, and we would conclude a “memorandum of understanding” that included a clear description of our mutual responsibilities. Our health programs are now known and respected throughout Africa and in the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean where we work. At Emory University, whenever I meet with groups of international students, I find that I am thanked for our contributions to health in the students’ home countries. We give the local people as much credit for accomplishments as possible. I spend a good amount of my time at celebrations, honoring the achievements of dedicated local health staff and volunteers. Our Carter Center staff plus those we train go into the most remote villages in jungle and desert areas to explain our goals, recruit volunteers, and train them and a few paid supervisors. Then we deliver donated medicines, water filtration cloths, and insecticide-treated bed nets and make sure that people know how these materials are to be properly used. We are treating about 35 million people every year. Over half of these are now for river blindness, and so far we have been able to eliminate this disease in four indigenous countries in Latin America and to demonstrate in Uganda and Sudan that the same goal can be reached in Africa. In 1986 there were an estimated 3.5 million cases of guinea worm in about 26,000 villages in twenty countries. In the entire world we had fewer than 130 cases in 2014. We are looking forward
to having this disease be the second in history eradicated from all nations. (The last case of smallpox was in 1977.)

We are responsible for about a third of the world’s surgeries to correct trachoma, the major cause of blindness except for cataracts, and have assisted in the construction of more than 3 million latrines to reduce the population of flies that transmit the disease. We have helped to install two bed nets in each home in Ethiopia and Nigeria where malaria exists. The nets are treated with an insecticide that kills mosquitoes on contact. These insects are the carriers for both malaria and lymphatic filariasis. One of our newest projects is to eliminate the two diseases from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, not always compatible, are cooperating fully on reaching this goal.

Our Center’s unique International Task Force for Disease Eradication has assumed the continuing responsibility of analyzing every human illness to determine which ones might possibly be eliminated from a particular region or country or eradicated from the entire world.

In 1985 Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, and I met in Geneva, Switzerland, and decided to organize Global 2000, an agricultural program designed to increase production of food grains in several places in Africa. We began our project in Ghana, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and expanded it to fourteen African nations, eventually teaching 8 million African families how to double or triple their production of maize (corn), wheat, rice, sorghum, and millet. With Japanese funding, Dr. Borlaug’s knowledge of agronomy, and our help with organization and implementation, we taught them how to use the best seed, plant in contoured rows to minimize erosion, use necessary fertilizer, control weeds, harvest at the right time, and store and market crops properly. We usually began with forty farmers in a country as
demonstrators and expanded in three years to about sixteen thousand. In Ethiopia the number of farms using our simple but effective farming practices reached several hundred thousand as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi financed the expansion with his government’s funds. After I met with national leaders to conclude agreements on how we would share responsibilities, I would travel with Borlaug to monitor compliance with our instructions.

On one visit to Addis Ababa, I was sleeping in a Western-style hotel and was wakened by intense itching of my left knee. I went into the bathroom and saw two small perforations, rubbed on some ointment, then returned to bed and went back to sleep. The next day Dr. Borlaug and I went about 150 miles south to visit some farm plots, spent the night there, and when we returned to Addis my knee was swollen. I went to the U.S. embassy, and the medical doctor gave me some antibiotic pills to take. When my entire leg then swelled to almost twice its normal size, he put me to bed with an IV. The following morning he decided that my life was threatened, and he and the Secret Service agents arranged for me to be flown to a U.S. military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany. The doctors there increased the strength of the medication, identified the probable species of spider from the puncture marks, and sent me back to Atlanta. By that time my body was covered with a rash, and I stayed in Emory University Hospital for five days while a team of doctors tried various treatments to reduce the swelling and intense itching. I recovered slowly but still have an aggravating rash that has to be treated regularly with prescribed salves and creams. Dermatologists say that the problem is permanent but manageable.

Although The Carter Center and I have engaged in conflict resolution efforts with the United Nations and the United States, we more often have addressed threatening situations where we were on our own. These choices are not always popular, because they put us in contact with unsavory people or groups. They have included Maoists in Nepal, the Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Radovan Karadži
ć
in Bosnia and Slobodan Miloševi
ć
in Serbia, Kim Il Sung and his successors in North Korea, the Castro brothers in Cuba, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, and leaders of Hamas in Gaza and other places. In every case we keep American leaders informed about our plans and the results of our efforts.

Rosalynn and I received the honor of wearing traditional garb during a visit to Tingoli village, northern Ghana, in 2007.