比尔·盖茨夫妇在2014斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲

　　The next day I went to Soweto – the poor township southwest of Johannesburg that had been a center of the anti-apartheid movement.

　　It was a short distance from the city into the township, but the entry was sudden, jarring, and harsh. I passed into a world completely unlike the one I came from.

　　My visit to Soweto became an early lesson in how naïve I was.

　　Microsoft was donating computers and software to a community center there – the kind of thing we did in the United States. But it became clear to me very quickly that this was not the United States.

　　I had seen statistics on poverty, but I had never really seen poverty. The people there lived in corrugated tin shacks with no electricity, no water, no toilets. Most people didn’t wear shoes; they walked barefoot along the streets. Except there were no streets – just ruts in the mud.

　　The community center had no consistent source of power, so they had rigged up an extension cord that ran about 200 feet from the center to a diesel generator outside. Looking at the setup, I knew the minute the reporters and I left, the generator would get moved to a more urgent task, and the people who used the community center would go back to worrying about challenges that couldn’t be solved by a PC.

　　When I gave my prepared remarks to the press, I said: “Soweto is a milestone. There are major decisions ahead about whether technology will leave the developing world behind. This is to close the gap.”

　　As I was reading those words, I knew they were irrelevant. What I didn’t say was: “By the way, we’re not focused on the fact that half a million people on this continent are dying every year from malaria. But we’re sure as hell going to bring you computers.”

　　Before I went to Soweto, I thought I understood the world’s problems, but I was blind to the most important ones. I was so taken aback by what I saw that I had to ask myself, “Do I still believe that innovation can solve the world’s toughest problems?”

　　I promised myself that before I came back to Africa, I would find out more about what keeps people poor.

　　Over the years, Melinda and I did learn more aboutthe most pressing needs of the poor. On a later tripto South Africa, I paid a visit to a hospital forpatients with MDR-TB, or multi-drug-resistanttuberculosis, a disease with a cure rate of under 50percent.

　　I remember that hospital as a place of despair. Itwas a giant open ward with a sea of patientsshuffling around in pajamas, wearing masks.

　　There was one floor just for children, including some babies lying in bed. They had a little schoolfor the kids who were well enough to learn, but many of the children couldn’t make it, and thehospital didn’t seem to know whether it was worth it to keep the school open.

　　I talked to a patient there in her early thirties. She had been a worker at a TB hospital when shecame down with a cough. She went to a doctor, and he told her she had drug-resistant TB.She was later diagnosed with AIDS. She wasn’t going to live much longer, but there were plentyof MDR patients waiting to take her bed when she vacated it.

　　This was hell with a waiting list.

　　But seeing hell didn’t reduce my optimism; it channeled it. I got in the car and told the doctorwho was working with us: “Yeah, I know. MDR-TB is hard to cure. But we should be able to dosomething for these people.” This year, we’re entering phase three with a new TB drug regime.For patients who respond, instead of a 50 percent cure rate after 18 months for $2,000, wecould get an 80-90 percent cure rate after six months for under $100.

　　That’s better by a factor of a hundred.

　　Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness.

　　That’s the attitude that says we can’t defeat poverty and disease.

　　We absolutely can.

　　Melinda: Bill called me after he visited the TB hospital. Ordinarily, if we’re calling from a trip, wejust go through the agenda of the day: “Here’s what I did; here’s where I went; here’s who Imet.” But this call was different. He said: “Melinda, I’ve gone somewhere I’ve never been before”and then he choked up and couldn’t talk. Finally he just said: “I’ll tell you when I get home.”

　　I knew what he was going through. When you see people with so little hope, it breaks yourheart. But if you want to do the most, you have to see the worst. That’s what Bill was doingthat day. I’ve had days like that, too.

　　Ten years ago, I traveled to India with friends. On the last day there, I spent some time meetingwith prostitutes. I expected to talk to them about the risk of AIDS, but they wanted to talkabout stigma. Most of these women had been abandoned by their husbands, and that’s whythey’d gone into prostitution. They were trying to make enough money to feed their kids. Theywere so low in the eyes of society that they could be raped and robbed and beaten by anybody– even by police – and nobody cared.