Thank you very much.
I listened to a woman in South Africa tell her story. This is a woman who has a face. She had taken her four-year-old child into her home because the child was HIV positive, and her husband left her because he wouldn't be in that home. As she told her story, tears just streamed down my face. She looked in my face and said, “Elizabeth, I don't want to cry anymore.” Then she broke into a deep, resonant song of hope that filled the room, and we all joined in, “Dumela, dumela”, a song of hope. African grandmothers told us face to face as they hugged us how empowering it was to realize that women in Canada cared about them. Imagine their absolute delight if they knew that the Canadian government was going to step up and show evidence of its global care and compassion.