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Sometimes,
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you have a negative feeling about things.
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You're not happy
about the way things are going.
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You feel frustrated and dissatisfied,
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and so often, we choose to live with it.
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It's a negative that
we tell ourselves we have to endure.
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And yet, I passionately believe
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that we all have the ability
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to turn that negative feeling
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into a positive
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by allowing our dissatisfaction
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to give birth to change.
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On January 6, 1999,
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I was working in London
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when the news channels began to report
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the rebel invasion of my hometown,
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Freetown, Sierra Leone.
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Thousands of people lost their lives
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and there were bodies
littering the streets of Freetown.
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My husband's elderly aunt
was burned alive,
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and I thought of my own two-year old
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as I saw images of little children
with amputated limbs.
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Colleagues said to me,
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"How can we help?"
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I didn't know,
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so I began to call the telephone numbers
that came up on my screen
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as international aid agencies
started to make appeals
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to raise money to address the tragedy.
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The vagueness of those telephone
conversations disappointed me.
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It felt like the people
who were raising the money
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seemed so far removed from the crisis,
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and understandably so,
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but I wasn't satisfied
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and I wasn't convinced
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that the interventions
they would eventually implement
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would actually have the level of impact
that was so clearly needed.
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There were butterflies
in my stomach for days
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as I continued to watch
horrors unfold on television,
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and I continuously asked myself,
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what could I be doing?
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What should I be doing?
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What I wanted to do was to help
children affected by the war.
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So that's what we did.
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Myself, my sister and some friends
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started the Sierra Leone
War Trust For Children, SLWT.
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We decided to focus
on the thousands of displaced people
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that fled the fighting
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and were now living
in really poor, difficult conditions
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in camps in Freetown.
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Our work started with the [??] Camp
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at the east end of the city.
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Working with a local health organization,
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we identified about 130
of the most vulnerable single mothers
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with children under the age of five,
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supporting them
by providing business skills,
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microcredit,
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whatever they asked us.
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Working in those difficult conditions,
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just getting the basics right,
was no small task,
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but our collective sense
of dissatisfaction
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at an unacceptable status quo
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kept us focused on getting things done.
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Some of those women went on
to open small businesses,
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repaid their loans,
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and allowed other mothers
and their children
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to have the same opportunity they did.
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And we, we kept on going.
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In 2004, we opened
an agricultural training center
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for ex-child soldiers,
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and when the war was behind us,
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we started a scholarship program
for disadvantaged girls
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who would otherwise not be able
to continue in school.
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Today, Stella, one of those girls,
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is about to qualify as a medical doctor.
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It's amazing what a dose
of dissatisfaction can birth.
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(Applause)
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Ten years later, in 2014,
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Sierra Leone was struck by Ebola.
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I was working in Freetown at the time
on a hotel construction project on May 25
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when the first cases were announced,
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but I was back in London on July 30
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when the state of emergency was announced,
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the same day that many airlines
stopped their flights to Sierra Leone.
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I remember crying for hours,
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asking God, why this? Why us?
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But beyond the tears,
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I began to feel again
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that profound sense of dissatisfaction.
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So when, six months after
those first cases had been confirmed,
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the disease was still spreading
rapidly in Sierra Leone
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and the number of people
infected and dying continued to rise,
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my level of frustration and anger
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got so much that I knew I could not stay
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and watch the crisis
from outside Sierra Leone.
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So, in mid-November,
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I said goodbye to my much loved
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and very understanding
husband and children,
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and boarded a rather empty plane
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to Freetown.
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Freetown was now
the epicenter of the outbreak.
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There were hundreds
of new cases every week.
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I spoke to many medical experts,
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epidemiologists
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and ordinary people every day.
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Everyone was really scared.
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"We won't succeed until we're talking
to people under the mango tree."
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So said Dr. Yoti,
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a Ugandan doctor who worked for WHO
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and who had been involved
in pretty much every Ebola outbreak
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in Africa previously.
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He was right,
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and yet there was no plan
to make that happen.
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So during a weekend in early December,
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I developed a plan that became known
as the Western Area Surge plan.
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We needed to talk with people,
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not at people.
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We needed to work
with the community influencers
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so people believed our message.
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We needed to be talking
under the mango tree,
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not through loudspeakers.
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And we needed more beds.
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The National Ebola Response Center, NERC,
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built on and implemented that plan,
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and by the third week of January,
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the number of cases
had fallen dramatically.
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I was asked to serve
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as a new Director of Planning for NERC,
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which took me right across the country,
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trying to stay ahead of the outbreak
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but also following it
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to remote villages in the provinces
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as well as to urban slum communities.
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On one occasion, I got out of my car
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to call for help for a man
who had collapsed on the road.
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I accidentally stepped in liquid
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that was coming down the road
from where he lay.
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I rushed to my parents' house,
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washed my feet in chlorine.
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I'll never forget waiting
for that man's test results
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as I constantly checked my temperature
then and throughout the outbreak.
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The Ebola fight was probably
the most challenging
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but rewarding experience of my life,
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and I'm really grateful
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for the dissatisfaction
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that opened up the space
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for me to serve.
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Dissatisfaction can be
a constant presence in the background,
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or it can be sudden,
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triggered by events.
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Sometimes it's both.
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With my hometown, that's the way it was.
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For years, our city had changed,
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and it had caused me great pain.
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I remember a childhood
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growing up climbing trees,
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picking mangoes and plums
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on the university campus
where my father was a lecturer.
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Went fishing in the streams
deep in the botanical gardens.
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The hillsides around Freetown
were covered with lush green vegetation,
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and the beaches were clean and pristine.
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The doubling of the population of Freetown
in the years that followed the civil war,
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and the lack of planning
and building control
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resulted in massive deforestation.
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The trees, the natural beauty,
were destroyed as space was made
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for new communities, formal or informal,
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and for the cutting down of firewood.
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I was deeply troubled and dissatisfied.
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It wasn't just the destruction
of the trees and the hillsides
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that bothered me.
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It was also the impact of people,
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as infrastructure failed to keep up
with the growth of the population:
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no sanitation systems to speak of,
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a dirty city with typhoid,
malaria and dysentery.
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I didn't know the statistics at the time,
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but it turned out that by 2017,
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only six percent of liquid waste
and 21 percent of solid waste
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was being collected.
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The rest was right there with us,
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in backyards, in fields, rivers
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and deposited in the sea.
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The steps to address that deep sense
of anger and frustration I felt
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didn't unfold magically or clearly.
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That's not how the power
of dissatisfaction works.
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It works when you know
that things can be done better,
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and it works when you decide to take
the risks to bring about that change.
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And so it was that in 2017
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I ended up running for mayor,
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because I knew things could be better.
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It seemed that people agreed with me,
because I won the election.
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(Applause)
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Today, we are implementing
an ambitious plan
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to transform our city,
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and when I say we,
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what gets me really excited
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is that I mean
the whole Freetown community,
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whether it's being part of competitions
like rewarding the neighborhood
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that makes the most improvement
in overall cleanliness,
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or whether it's our programs
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that are leading and joining
people and waste collectors
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through our apps.
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In Freetown today,
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it's a much cleaner city,
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and those trees
that we're so well known for,
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we planted 23,000 of them
last rainy season.
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(Applause)
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And in 2020,
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we plan to plant a million trees as part
of our "Freetown the Tree Town" campaign.
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(Applause)
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Sometimes, sometimes we have
a negative feeling about things.
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We're not happy about
the way things are going.
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We feel dissatisfied
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and we feel frustrated.
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We can change that negative
into a positive.
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If you believe that things can be better,
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then you have the option to do something
rather than to do nothing.
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The scale and circumstances
of our situations will differ,
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but for each of us,
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we all have one thing in common.
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We can take risks to make a difference,
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and I will close in saying,
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step out,
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take a risk.
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If we can unite behind
the power of dissatisfaction,
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the world will be a better place.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)