 Welcome to everyone, a very warm welcome. Thank you so much for joining us this morning on a very, very windy, difficult Washington morning. My name is Margaret Taylor. I'm a fellow in the post-conflict reconstruction project here at CSIS. We're so pleased, the post-conflict reconstruction project is so pleased, to be co-hosting this event with the organization for economic development cooperation. We're just absolutely thrilled to be here. We've worked hard and tirelessly to put all of this together. And we're happy to have it all come together so well. And again, welcome. I'm going to explain briefly the format for the presentations. I'm going to make very, very brief welcome remarks. I will introduce very briefly each of our guests. Then I will hand things over to Mr. Richard Carey, the Director of the Development Cooperation Directorate, which is the Secretary for the Development Assistance Committee within the OECD. He will do his introductory remarks for about 10 minutes. And then each of the panelists will have about up to eight minutes to make some remarks. Thereafter, I will open the question and answer session with a few questions of my own. And then thereafter, I will open it up to the floor. We will have two microphones for that portion of the event. So if you do have a question, please raise your hand. And if one of our helpers with the microphone comes over, please state your affiliation, your name and your affiliation. And please use the microphone and also keep your questions somewhat short as we want to get to as many questions as we can. I'm sure there's a lot of really great folks here in the audience who I'm sure will have a lot of interesting questions and comments. As I was reading through and reflecting on the global report and some of the individual reports that we're launching today, I was thinking that it really provides us an opportunity to, and when I say us and we, I mean broadly, the international community, donor governments, implementers of assistance programs in fragile states, provides an opportunity for us to really think about what we are actually doing is, what we're doing is actually working in these fragile states. Because it's so important, and that's really the goal we're all trying to get toward. And I think it's easy to forget that in the day-to-day rush of getting money for programs, implementing programs, making sure various domestic constituencies are satisfied. So I think that this report and the work of the OECD DAC is really giving us a good opportunity to think about that in a comprehensive global way. And that's really unique, I think, and we're really lucky to have them. I know as a scholar, I often turn to the OECD DAC website for all manner of information, not the least of which is the graphs and all the wonderful statistics, which really put things together globally. So without further ado, I will just briefly introduce each of our guests here. And I invite you to look at your materials for the full biographies of each of the guests. And I just also want to note that this is being audio recorded and also video recorded for the purpose of, we will put this up on our website also. So first, doing our introductory remarks, we have Richard Carey, the director of the Development Cooperation Directorate. He has had a very long career with the DAC, so we're absolutely thrilled to have him here. Next, we have Minister Amelia Perez. She is the Finance Minister of the Government of Timor-Lest, which is one of the countries that was the subject of this review. And most of the individual country reports are available out in the hallway. She has been involved with this process from the beginning, as I understand. She's going to present her experiences from the Timor process. Next, we have Neil Levine, the director of the Office of Conflict, Management, and Mitigation at the United States Agency for International Development. We're very happy to have the administration, the USG view here to share as well, also a very long and distinguished career at USAID and elsewhere. Next is Johanna Mendelssohn-Forman. We're, again, just delighted to have her. She's a senior associate here in the America's Program at the Center for Strategic International Studies. I consider Johanna to be an expert on pretty much anything. But most recently, she has been focusing on Haiti, not only what's happened since the earthquake, but before. So I think she will provide just a wonderful context for not only the report, but putting the Haiti specific report, but for putting it in the context of what has happened there since the earthquake. And finally, we have Fatima Sumar. She is a professional staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she works directly for the chairman of the committee, Senator John Kerry. She's an expert on South and Central Asia. And she will be speaking specifically to Afghanistan issues with reference to the report, but also the US perspective and the congressional perspective on what the US government is doing in Afghanistan. So we're absolutely delighted to have all of you. And just one note, there was scheduled to be one more panelist named Karen Hanrahan from the Department of State. She called me last night and said the Secretary of State called her into a meeting this morning, and she had to cancel. And I said, that was the only excuse she could give me. That would be acceptable. So unfortunately, she will not be joining us today, but she sends her warm regards and her regrets that she couldn't be with us here today. So without further ado, I will hand things over to Mr. Richard Kerry. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Margaret. And good morning, everybody. It's a real pleasure to be here. And it's also, for me, a very significant event, my last official event, because I'm retiring at the end of the month. As you said, Margaret, I've had a long career, 30 years. But these last couple of days in Washington where we've had a senior level meeting of our international network on conflict and fragility have been one of the highlights, because I think we're here on an absolutely key frontier for the world. And we're working at and beyond the frontier of this very vital subject. So I'm going to introduce the first OECD fragile states survey, but I do want to give you a bit of context before I do that. First of all, on the OECD, what is the OECD? Not a very well understood institution, but it's a place for collective thinking and collective action. And that's what it does. It has conference center. And every day there are conferences. And those conferences are actually the collective thinking processes of the OECD members and increasingly a much wider range of countries joining in to OECD activities and joining into activity such as this one. And that's why we have Mr. Perez here, who is really a central part of this whole process. So this collective thinking process is getting globalized. And in the DAC, we are the place where donors do their collective thinking about the aid business. And again, it's being globalized because we have a working party on aid effectiveness that includes scores of partner countries. It includes the NGOs. It includes parliamentarians. And it's come up with Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, which are the rules of the game for aid effectiveness. They're not agreed by in any institution at all. They exist in some kind of international space. But they are the reference point. And it's a process like the one we're discussing today on fragile states because the NCAF, the International Network on Conflict Fragility, is also one of these places for global collective thinking about this whole issue, this very important issue of fragile states. And then alongside the network is the dialogue with fragile states. And that's a place where the members of NCAF sit around the table with 15 fragile states in a conversation about what is fragility and what are the ways to help fragile states. And so it's great that Mr. Perez is here to tell you how that works from her perspective. Now, what is the problem atique? Well, for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the assumption is that we have a set of effective and decent states. And where that obtains, then people flourish. Populations flourish. But the reality of the world is that we have 50 or more fragile states. That is to say states where the political settlement is either non-existent, unsettled, or very weak, or where state capacities are very weak. And these are also countries which, for the most part, highly aid dependent. So when you have an aid industry working at that country, everything they do impacts on the state building agenda, either positively or negatively, often negatively. Because nobody thinks, nobody has been thinking of that. Nobody has been thinking of how to provide aid with a state building lens. And so that's what's going on right now with the international network and the international dialogue and with the principles for good international engagement in fragile states, which were put together in after a conference in London a few years ago. Again, not any international institution, just a gathering of the actors who produced principles that are the point of reference. And so it's those principles that have been monitored and the results of that monitoring in this report, which are in front of you today. Now, monitoring, it's actually much more than monitoring, because the way it's being done is through having teams who work in the country with the government, with the society in the country, and are sitting down and reviewing what is the performance against these 10 principles. And so it's a conversation, and it's a conversation that actually moves the agenda forward, where people can interact with each other. So it's not a set of monitors who are coming in from the sky and ticking boxes. It is a process. It's a process through which things move forward. So I think that that's what you need to bear in mind as you look through this report and as you listen to the conversation today. Now, we have this reality of 50 fragile states in the world. We have the reality that there isn't enough political capital or political energy to focus on solving all those cases at once. We know that a number of these cases are so preoccupying and so central to international security that there is the political capital and energy. Although that's also fragile, as we know. Some countries can't stay engaged. They disengage. One of those countries had a change of government in Europe this week. So it's a really contentious and difficult agenda. So how can the international community provide a way of staying engaged in 50 countries where we need to be very consciously thinking about the state building agenda in those countries? So one of the ways is through this process and through the principles on good international engagement and through the collective thinking process which has produced these books that are outside, do no harm. That is, the aid community thinking very actively of what its impact is in these fragile states. Being aware when they may be doing harm and being aware of where they could contribute to political settlements, to state society relations, to the standing of the government, transition financing. When we're putting money into situations of post-conflict and moving to the development phase, how do we do that? And how does that help the position of the government and the finance minister to have sustainable programs to build human capital and to build institutions? And here, the state's legitimacy in fragile situations. You can't have aid agencies going into fragile countries without them going back and thinking about these issues. And of course, for centuries, philosophers have talked about the foundations of the state. And it's not been in the training programs of our aid agency people. But in these situations, people have to have that in their heads. So just to say that this whole process has brought the state-building agenda into, it was bringing it into people's thinking. And then we have in the United Nations peace-building commission with a mandate to really help develop longer-term approaches to peace-building and to help evolve peace-building strategies so that there's a strategy for peace-building. So these, I would argue, are the beginnings of a way in which the international community can deal with the reality of 50 fragile states and make progress on them. Now, I've spent quite a lot of time on the context of all this because I think it's really important to understand what's going on here and what's going on in the monitoring process. And so we are applying the 10 fragile states principles. We're measuring how we're doing in six countries. And we've got the results in front of us that are telling us something about the way we're managing to behave or not managing to behave well. So in the executive summary, you've got the basic table that tells you, after the survey of these six countries, how we're all doing. And it starts up the top with bold green type, which says where we're doing good overall, and red at the bottom, we're doing weak. So we're weak down at the bottom, and we're good up the top. Where are we good? The 10 principles, if you haven't already got them, are on this little card here. Always to be carried around with you. So what we're seeing in this picture is that we're good, moderate, and improving on about half of the principles and performance is weak, moderate, or mixed on the other half. So half full, half empty. But as somebody said, at least there's a glass. So where we're doing well, we are promoting non-discrimination as a basis for inclusive and stable societies. So international actors, they are watching out for discriminatory practices and arguing and working for more inclusive, stable societies. And there's a lot of awareness on this, a lot of argument for it. Now, we're not succeeding everywhere. We've got some pockets of very bad persisting discrimination. And that's, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the gender-based violence that's going on there, and the use of rapes of war still persisting. So good overall, but by no means have we won the whole case there. Then we go to the moderate and improving section and the recognition of the links between political security and development objectives. That's now pretty broadly recognized. And what that means, of course, is that we need the different policy communities here, the defense community, the diplomatic community, and the development community to be working together. That is what Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is all about. And there, her position is that the diplomacy and development parts of that foreign policy need to be strengthened so that the defense part of it can progressively be reduced. And this also needs an accent on economic growth to get the growth process going in a fragile state so that it begins to help with the reputation of the state and all of the factors that can disrupt the state, like youth unemployment and so forth. But getting these three policy communities really to really act together is still a huge frontier. And differences of terminology, thinking processes, planning processes, et cetera, still make it a really difficult frontier for us. And one we have to focus on is, of course, of extreme actuality right now in places like Afghanistan, the nub of the problem right now in many ways. Now, Principle 7 is also in this moderate improving category, aligning to local priorities according to context. So that donors are working with governments and that the government development framework is the development framework. There is much more consciousness that is critical. That if there are 20 donors in a country and they all come along with their own priorities and programs, that's a recipe for destructuring the government. And it's got to be the government's own program that the donors play into. And then on agreeing practical coordination mechanisms between the international actors, there are so many international actors that this becomes a huge problem in itself, of course. In finding the mechanisms, the discussion mechanisms in country, but also the financial mechanisms to make this work is really hard. We've rated it moderate improving, but still a huge amount of work to do on that and work on instruments like multi-dota trust funds, which are going to be key issue in Haiti, for example, how a multi-dota trust fund can be set up and work in Haiti over a long period of time. And in Afghanistan also, how can the, there be much more pooling of donor money and how can that feed into national programs which the Afghani parliament actually oversees and accountability systems work and national programs are reached out into the villages. So those are issues that have to be worked on. Then act fast and stay engaged, but act fast but stay engaged. So we are seeing cases where there is more rapid response capacity and there is rapid response humanitarian capacity. Now, that's evident in some places, less evident in other places. So that's why it's getting not the full rating. And on staying engaged, we are starting to see people work in terms of 10-year partnership agreements, which really this is a long-term business and it makes a very big difference what time frame you're using, whether it's a one-year thing, which very difficult for Minister of Finance if there's no predictability, how do you plan for investing in human capital and capacity building, et cetera, et cetera. But then we have some countries where there is no engagement or very little engagement like the Central African Republic. It's a lonely country. They feel lonely. They feel forgotten. And that's a country we've covered in the survey as well. Now, on the principle of doing no harm where performance is moderate, sorry, I've skipped over mixed, take context as a starting point. It's actually number one of these principles. But the shared understanding of a given context, you might think that is something that we could do, but we can't do it. It's very hard. It's very hard to get analysis done of the context that is really shared. There's lots of it going on, but the process of having it really shared and really shared with the people in the state itself is difficult. And those of you who are in the business of doing analytical work like this know that it's difficult. And having it shared through political processes and embedded in programming, you know how hard that is. OK, so then to the moderately successful implementation, the principle of do no harm. That is to make sure that your program is not undermining the state-building agenda, taking away from the state's capacities by setting up parallel implementation units, for example. This is an area where we're only moderately successful and an area where aid agencies have to be very, very conscious of what they are doing. Is it doing harm or is it helping? And then focus on state-building as the central objective, closely related. It means that people who are in the position of designing aid programs and working with countries have to have this in their mental framework that actually what they're doing is not this program or that project, but they are trying to help build a state that can function on an ongoing basis and function more and more cohesively and be a more cohesive and effective and decent state that that is the real name of the game. And so it's a question of mentality. It's a question of training of people and agencies. There's an agency management and training agenda here that we are beginning to get on to, but we need to take a lot more further. Prioritized prevention. Prevention is an investment in not having to deal with chaotic situations, but we don't prioritize it enough. And finally, at the bottom, avoid pockets of exclusion. The principle where we were doing best was to promote non-discrimination as the basis for inclusive and stable societies and we're doing quite well there, but paradoxically, we're still having pockets of exclusion where would become real big trouble spots which become areas where there's human degradation and destabilizing trends in societies. So that's where we are. And the idea is that the process will be repeated in a few years' time. We will continue the monitoring in the context of the Paris Declaration because this whole agenda is now in the Accra agenda for action and there's a high level meeting in Seoul at the end of 2011. So we'll bring it into that big meeting but then the process of meeting as we've been meeting in the six countries will continue over the longer term as necessary so that we're working together to build effective and decent states. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Richard. Richard has agreed to remain up on the stage and on the panel so he will luckily be available to field questions later for the Q and A session. Minister Pires. Thank you, Margaret. Good morning to everybody. I'm just wondering how best I should intervene here to make it to add value from what Richard was talking about. I assume, I don't know the audience. I assume that most of you are people working either in the field or in this academic field. So I'm just thinking to react on what Richard was saying in the sense of how people in that field needs some sort of training and changing their mentality. I was actually thinking about that and I'm thinking the only way for you to really understand the effect of aid in a country is for you to actually work from where we are. It's important probably to get into our shoes and it's easy. You just have to work in the aid effectiveness unit or the aid coordination, then you will see the challenges that we face in dealing with yourselves. So it's very, very important. I've been lucky because I've been on the two sides of the world and I remember when Richard was mentioned the Paris Declaration. I remember I was in London when there was an invitation for me to go and go into OECD. I didn't even know what it was all about. This dark business. And then I went into this room and then they asked me to speak and then I spoke and then later on I found out that the Paris Declaration principles came out of all that conversation that I've participated right at the beginning without even knowing for sure that this is where it was leading. But I want to give you a sense. People coming from our side, often we are participating in many things but we don't even know what is the impact because we don't have time to analyze things. We don't have time to sit back, reflect and then see the impact of a policy, actions, etc. So this is why I welcome sessions like this. Nowadays I take time to participate because it helps me also reflect back on what we are doing and how to improve and how to influence the global policies. The other kind of event that was like for me it was important is that I also landed in Accra. So I landed in Accra at the invitation of an institution. Again, thinking, okay, I can go there and share the experience, so what's the big deal? Then as they were talking, and they were talking about how to monitor the international actors when they are engaging in the country, whoa, there's something here for me. I might as well make an ally of these people. And so when there was an opportunity I offered Timor-Lessie to be part of this pilot project. Why? Because I couldn't coordinate these 46 donors anymore. I was going over my head. I just either I gave up or I engaged part of this whole process. And so I had an agenda, a healing agenda to be part of this. Because I needed somebody big as like OECD to help us monitor those donors because they're big, they're not small. And I tell you, they bully you, and we are too small. And so I thought, if I get this ally then I will be able to speak and then understand a little bit more and then maybe influence the behavior of these donors. In Timor-Lessie we have 46 donors. It is good because that means they want to help us. But it's also kind of a nightmare for us. Like it is really hard. But I have to tell you, because we are able to sit together and be very honest, be very frontal. So we found means and ways to kind of help each other to coordinate because at the end, when I'm right at the end of my feather, I just say to them, if I fail, you fail. So what do you want to do now? Either you help me be a success story, then you are successful as well. So for me to be successful, you better listen to me. Because if I listen to you, I may fail. And so we go like this, not kind of blackmailing each other. And but then at the end we find, we get to where we agree and then we move on. I just wanted to give you a bit of some examples, real case examples so that you can kind of, if you are facing with that when you are out there on the field, remember these examples. When I came back, went back to Timur after Akra, I was so excited. So I called a meeting with all the donors and then I showed them the Paris Declaration. I said, all your ministers signed this, okay? And that's what they promised in there, to do this, this and that. And then I was very keen because like, these principles were beautiful for us. And in one of them says, use country systems, do this, do that, align your programs to the priorities of the country. So I said, this is what your minister and I have access to them. If you don't do this, I'll make a phone call to say that you are not doing it or OECD is going to monitor you and this and that. And then one of them said, minister, we really want to help you out. But for example, I said, why don't you use our systems? So he said, can I be honest with you? And I said, yes, for sure, go ahead. So he goes, well, minister, you don't have capacity. That's why we can't use your systems. They are weak and et cetera. Like this, you don't have the capacity. We want to liaise with this. We can get this ministry here, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, yeah, pour it all out. Because then I will answer. And so after that, I said to him, yeah, now you tell me you have capacity, yeah? And this was an agency, okay? This was not a donor. So I said, how do you have this capacity? First of all, you steal all my people, the best people I have, the best brains, you steal them all by paying them higher wages. And then you tell me to pay very little wages because I have to be sustainable. But you don't have to be sustainable. So you take the best brains, you give them higher money and you pay. And if these best brains are not good enough, you go to the international arena and you bring in the best consultants, paying very high wages. And where do you get that money from? From those donors who got it from those taxpayers who thinks they are helping me. And then you sit in that little corner, surround yourself with a big fence because it's conflict. It is dangerous to go out. So you have all these police and security, et cetera, in these beautiful white buildings. And how are you supposed to help me? I'm struggling my treasury, trying to deal with this public financial management, free balances and whatever systems I have now with people that I have third grade mathematics or numeracy, because this is what happened to me when I took over the government. I found out that most of my ministry of finance, 60% had third grade numeracy. How did this happen? I have no clue. And you know, Asians and upon Asians have been in my country. So I said, now what? So I asked him, what are you here for? He goes, I have to help you build your capacity. Then you build it inside my system. Stop building it out there. Get those people, if they are Timorese, pay them and let them stay with me. Pay those international and let them sit in my treasury. I've opened, I'm offering you that. So that's very important and still hasn't sunk yet. So now you know, I have a fight in my country because the donors think that there is a brain drain to the government because what I did is lucky for me, I came up with, you know, we, Tim would have a little bit of money. So we said, okay, now I'm gonna match the wages and I'm gonna bring them all back into the system. And so now we are like fighting for those brains. And there was one person who said, you're stealing all my people. I said, your people? Your people? All my people? So you know, it's like that. The other one is context. I have meetings. Now I have like four meetings in a year with all the development partners, with all the ministers. We all sit together, et cetera, et cetera. And then the same question is asked. I don't know if many people knows about the history of Timore, but we've been independent for about 10 years. No, seven years, actually. 10 years, I mean, we've been free 10 years. The first two and a half years was ruled by the UN and then the Timorese government took over. And then the second government now is in place. But for the, between those 10 years, if you look at our history, every two years, we have a bit of, we have a conflict. And the last one that took place was back in February 11, 2008, when my prime minister and president were, there were attempt assassination to their lives. But thank God, since then to now, we've had peace and stability. And this is where we wanted to share with the international community, with other fragile states. How come we managed to get peace and stability for so long? It's past two years now, because every time within two years, and we are like, okay, is it going to happen again? Where is it coming from, et cetera, et cetera. But just this context business. Often donors, they like you to have like a medium term, long term plan. And I didn't understand, because there was like so much pressure. We need your plan, we need your plan, we need your plan. And there we are there fighting fires, putting out fires every day because we inherited a crisis. We came into power because of a crisis. My country nearly ended up as a failed state back in 2006. Even I did not believe that we would make it. But now when I look back, I said, my God, there was a miracle. But it was not really a miracle. So that's why we are in the process of reflecting and finding out what is it that we did that actually contributed to this peace and stability that now we enjoy. And sometimes we forget that it was only just two years and a half where we couldn't even sleep during the night because of consequences of that crisis. And so with people that are demanding of us to have this medium term to long term plan, at the end I just couldn't take it anymore. I said, listen, we need to find out. We need to agree where we are now. And at what phase of whatever, development or post-conflict or whatever, are we? Because there doesn't seem to have a common consensus from everybody of where we are because there are different ways of behaving. When you are in that conflict, you behave in a different way. You are like with the emergency and stuff like that. You are fastest person getting out there. You don't have to obey all these rules. Then you move on to this recovery stage and you do it in a different way. And then of course, when you go into development, yes, you have to have your vision. You have to have your medium term, long term things, expenditure frameworks. You name it, all these slogans or jargons that are in this documented literature, starts applying. But for us, how we did it is we had to take a day at a time, a month at a time, a year at a time. So to satisfy some people, we said, okay, let's try to do a plan, but we have to do a priority for this year. Because there were too many unknowns. Things were so volatile. I had, we had roaming army group rebels running around the mountains being a threat to the national security. Petitioners, which were like 700 soldiers that Ronald walked out from the army. And these people were trained. They knew how to use guns. So all they had was access to a gun and that's it. Out there, and then we had 150,000 IDPs all over the city plus some other districts. Youth, gangs, all over the place. How could we handle that? How could we sit down and do a plan? We couldn't. It was impossible. We had to act very fast. We had to be very flexible. And as a minister of finance, I had to tune in to these things and say, okay, priority for that moment was ministry of defense and security, because without that we couldn't go anywhere. So whatever they asked me, it had to go. Everything stops and we process their paperwork. Then solidarity because of IDPs. Because these were nuclear for manipulation by others because there are bad people who wanted to use these guys that are so fragile to make them explode. So it was like we were living today, there may be an explosion there tomorrow, another one there. So we had to kind of neutralize that, balance all this act. So we did that and we were so ambitious. I remember, okay, then the international community tells us this, oh, you can't fix these IDPs over, it's going to take you 10 years. Now, our mandate is five years. If it's gonna take 10 years, we're finished. Like there will be no other government that can actually handle this because not one single government can sort that out. The people, they have no more beliefs in any government. And there was no confidence in government at the time. So we had to get that as well. We had to get the trust of the people as well, which was gone at that time. So it was really anarchic at that time. So we said no to the international community, we said no way, we're gonna have it within one year. But in reality, we managed to do it within less than two years. We put them all back into their original place. But with a lot of, you see, this is the thing. Often some agencies, they can't change their mentality. And they keep telling, we need some positive support because we are already out there with these big problems. We can't afford to have you coming in and say, you can't do that, it's not going to work and this and that. We are also human beings. We need to know to be a bit secure that we are taking chance. But we were lucky because we had a prime minister who used to be a guerrilla fighter. He used to say to me, why are you listening to these people? Am I your boss or not? Sometimes, because I used to go there and said, oh, you know, they are saying this and they are saying that and this and we cannot do that. And so he said, believe in yourself. Do you believe it? Go for it and do it. I'll be there to back you up. And so we did it. And so we did a few things. We financed those IDPs. We gave them direct money without any go-betweens because normally the practice is you hire an NGO and the NGO is going to go and help the IDPs. And the IDPs says no because the NGO is going to take all that money and then we have nothing at the end and they have the ones like, oh my gosh, there was all that stuff. So we said, okay, we'll sit together. We signed a contract between you and me, people to people, you don't trick me because like I said, oh my God, they will take that money and they'll do something else. So what? Yes, but they move back to their places but you make sure that there is this dialogue that it's between two people, equal, not father to child because then the child goes spend and then comes back to the father or the mother. I need more. So we had to get that out of the way and created that atmosphere that it was like we respected. I think at the end, I said to some of my development partners, I said, you know what? I learned a lesson. You need to treat those people with respect as if they were just like you. Pretend, put yourself in their place. How would you like to be treated? And then I remember back in 75, when I was a refugee, how would I have liked to be treated? Like a noted child, someone that you don't trust. What happened? Just because of my situation, I became a refugee. I've lost dignity, respect of a person because so all that, we have to change all our mind setting to actually face these people as normal people just like yourselves. Then go in that way and then you will find the answer. And I'm so glad that we did it that way and now they disappeared. They've gone back and they're not a burden to us. And so we can move on to the next phase. Now we can move on and we're doing that strategic plan so that finally that particular development partner will be happy when we move on to the next month. So these are just examples. Mr. Perez, you've been wonderful and I think you've teed up. Sorry, excuse me. I think you've teed up some really great questions for our next panel.