Rebecca McKinsey

When Paul Farmer spoke to a crowded Amphitheater audience earlier this week about global health efforts in Haiti and Rwanda, one audience member was right there in Rwanda with him. When Melissa Driver Beard, executive director and CEO of Engineering World Health, came to Chautauqua’s “Global Health and Development as Foreign Policy” week, she had two goals in mind.

“She was there for many of the most important firsts: the first moments of startled clarity, the first phone calls from Washington to Islamabad, the first high-level meetings. On Thursday morning, Sept. 13, she brought the list of eighteen key military demands to President Pervez Musharraf and sat stiffly in his office for forty minutes until he answered the question she’d carried from the president: ‘Are you with us in this fight?’ When he said, ‘I am, without conditions,’ she got up and left.”

A journalist who has reported from South Africa and the Middle East will conduct an interview on the Amphitheater stage today. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a freelance journalist based in Johannesburg, will interview Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE USA, at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. They will discuss CARE’s work in the global health sphere.

When he steps behind the podium today, John Hamre says the audience he’ll be addressing will be made up of the same type of people he tries to recruit every day to effect international change. Hamre is the president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, non-profit organization that seeks to change policy by providing ideas and strategies to government officials, international figures and members of the private sector. He will speak at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.