20/20 Exclusive: The First Daughter's First TV Interview

Sept. 25, 2007 — -- Jenna Bush has taken on many roles in her nearly 26 years.

To America, she is the granddaughter of a former president, the daughter of President Bush and first lady Laura, a sister to her fraternal twin, Barbara, and a teacher to elementary school students in Washington, D.C.

But recently, Bush has taken on several new roles and she sat down with Diane Sawyer to discuss her work with UNICEF, her engagement to Henry Hager that made headlines around the world and her first book, "Ana's Story."

In the fall of 2006, Bush was hired as an intern to teach and chronicle the stories of children in four countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. At a UNICEF-supported conference for women and children, she met a woman she calls "Ana," a 17-year-old mother living with HIV.

"She stood up in front of everybody and she said, 'I want everybody here to know that we're living with HIV/AIDS. We're not dying from it.' The more I got to know her, the more inspired I became," Bush said.

She was so moved by Ana's story that she wrote a book based on her life.

"I didn't go to Latin America thinking, 'I'm gonna write a book. This is what I'm gonna do.' I went there to work for UNICEF and to learn. But as my job for UNICEF was to document the lives of kids living in exclusion, I wanted to make them more than statistics. So I would take the statistic and write their historias de vitas — the stories of their lives — and then I met Ana. Through all the kids, I thought, 'This could be more, there should be something more,'" Bush said.

"Although she was orphaned at a young age and was born with HIV/AIDS and suffered abuse in her home … and she's a teenage mother … she sees her life as perfect," Bush said. "She sees her life as the way, you know, God made it for her, and she never complains. She dances."

The story may be about Ana, but Bush says her book is a portrait of the many children she met while in Latin America, a representation of the millions of children around the world living with the same adversities.

"What about the abstinence question, which we think of as part of the administration? Was it tricky to be writing about AIDS and sexual choices and condoms?" Sawyer asked Bush.