We're trying to bring improved seeds to rural villages to increase yields. We're also trying to improve the roads to make it easier for people to get their produce to the market.
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
Beyond highways and roads, we need more money for mass transit, intercity passenger rail and freight rail. We have a long way to go to bridge the funding gaps.
Bridges and roads take years to build, but too often, states and communities haven't known if funding will be there for them more than a few months at a time.
Every president, Democrat or Republican, every Congress, has gotten behind the idea that we have to invest in our highways, our bridges, our roads, our airports. The idea that now this is somehow a partisan issue, it boggles the mind.
For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there's some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.
The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.
Each year over 2,500 commercial vessels enter the Port of Hampton Roads alone, so adequate funding for port security is a significant issue for those of us who live in Richmond and Hampton Roads.
Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
