I like politics. I like traveling in the United States.

In many developing countries, girls don't go to school. They stay home. They are at the water wells, bringing water back and forth to the village. Or they are doing chores, preparing meals, farming. Some cultures think girls and women shouldn't be educated, and those are very often the places where the treatment of women and girls is the worst.

A good book is like an unreachable itch. You just can't leave it alone.

Bluffton is growing. But we must hold on to that small-town character.

I was the same way after graduating with a degree in education. I started to teach and I was wondering: do I really know how to teach?

The English language lacks the words 'to mourn an absence.' For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful, some not. Still, we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only 'I am sorry for your loss.' But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?

If you take the burden of health care, of diseases off the backs of some other countries, it gives them a chance to use their own very limited resources in ways that help their people. And also there's a hopelessness associated with deadly diseases, that if that can be alleviated, people can build their own economies in their own countries and they'll be less reliant on the developed world for help.