Blog Posts, and Videos Reckoning with the World We’ve Built Unfavorite Favorite Aspen Global Leadership NetworkFormer USAID Administrator Gayle Smith and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede, Founder & Host, Africa in the World (Africa Leadership Initiative – South Africa), have spent careers bearing witness to some of the worst moments in recent history — the Ethiopian famine, the Rwandan genocide, and war in the Balkans — first as journalists, later as humanitarian leaders. In this conversation, they reflected on what it meant to see atrocity up close, the political and bureaucratic language used to avoid responding to it, and the toll of carrying what could not be unseen. The conversation also turned to the present: the recent dismantling of USAID, the erosion of institutions built over decades, and the fear of growing indifference. But both speakers pushed back against despair, pointing to real historical progress, from the end of apartheid in South Africa to global health breakthroughs, as evidence that choosing to act, together, still works.