Reporter's Notebook: On The Road With Bill Clinton

Aug. 4, 2007 — -- Africa is a vibrant place. It's full of color and energy. There's a smell that stays with you when you visit -- a mix of dust and smoke and sweat. I bought an African doll for my two-year-old daughter in Arusha, Tanzania, at an open market and it has that smell. You can't escape it.

The first thing you notice is how crowded Africa seems. And that's especially true when you show up with a former president of the United States.

For six days last month, I traveled through four countries in Africa with former President Bill Clinton. We started in South Africa, then traveled to Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. We were the only television crew on the trip. The other journalists worked for monthly magazines or news wire services.

We journalists had our own plane. We paid for the seats of course -- but the plane itself is owned by a Vancouver, Canada billionaire. President Clinton had his own larger jumbo jet.

Traveling with Clinton is head-spinning. One day I'm meeting Nelson Mandela, the next day I am in a muddy field with a farmer. We're on this luxury jet, but when we drive through towns we witness unthinkable poverty.

And despite the jet, life on the road isn't always glamorous. In Malawi, we spent hours waiting on the tarmac when Bill Clinton's plane had technical problems. Some of my colleagues laid down on the pavement in the middle of the tarmac. There were very few planes coming and going at Chileka International Airport.

It was worth the wait. Eventually, we boarded the only helicopters available in all of Malawi and flew over gorgeous undeveloped countryside. When we landed we saw crowds of thousands. The people who live in this part of rural Malawi have very little. But they literally walked for miles from their homes and waited in the hot sun just in the hopes of meeting Bill Clinton. The whole time we were stuck on that tarmac they were waiting patiently.

Most of them never even got to shake his hand. But it was enough just to catch a glimpse of Clinton's stark white hair.

They don't come out because Clinton is a former president or because he's married to a presidential candidate now. In fact, most people I asked in every country we visited had never even heard the name Hillary Clinton. "Not so much," said one shopkeeper in Arusha.

Abbash told me he didn't know anything about Clinton's wife, but as a 20 year old who has had malaria 30 times, he wanted to celebrate the work Clinton's foundation is doing in Africa.

"It is helping us," Abbash told me. "We have a lot of people that are sick."

That's an understatement. Of the 40 million people in Tanzania, most have had malaria. The disease kills 100,000 people in that country every year, most of them young children. Clinton's foundation has just negotiated lower prices for a key drug to treat malaria.

"I came here to see," said Abbash. "And to know this man."

Most of the Clinton Foundation's work here has to do with fighting HIV-AIDS. All politics aside, it's hard to argue with the foundation's accomplishments. Over the past five years, the price of treating HIV positive people in Zambia, for example, has dropped dramatically. In Zambia, 17 percent of the nation's adults are HIV positive.

So while Bill Clinton may not make daily headlines in the United States anymore, in Zambia his visit is front page news with a large bold headline.

On my return from Africa, people have been asking, "What's Clinton really like?"

He's charismatic as ever. He's a little older now. He wears granny glasses to read. And he does read voraciously. Clinton says he routinely stays up until two in morning reading books. His current favorite is a book about Einstein. "I want to understand physics before I die," Clinton tells us.

He's hopeful about what he's doing here.

When I asked him if he's an optimist, he said, "Well yeah, always. And I think the evidence is on my side. I mean, if you look at-- No matter how tough things seem in the moment, I think it pays to be optimistic. Also, being pessimistic is sort of a cop out. It gives you the excuse not to do anything."

It's not all work here. On the last day of the trip, Clinton takes us on safari. He has always wanted to visit the Ngoro Ngoro crater in northern Tanzania. We watch a pack of hyenas working on breakfast. We see zebras, lions, wildebeests, elephants.

It was, said Clinton, "like mother earth's embrace."