I want to finish up here by pointing out some folks that are up with the First Lady that represent what I’m trying to talk about.  Citizens.  I have no idea what their party affiliation is or who they voted for in the last election, but they represent what we ought to be doing.

Cindy Perry teaches second-graders to read in AmeriCorps in rural Kentucky.  She gains when she gives.  She’s a mother of four.

She says that her service inspired her to get her high school equivalency last year.  She was married when she was a teen-ager.  Stand up, Cindy.  She married when she was a teen-ager.  She had four children, but she had time to serve other people, to get her high school equivalency and she’s going to use her AmeriCorps money to go back to college.

Steven Bishop is the police chief of Kansas City.  He’s been a national leader—­stand up Steve.  He’s been a national leader in using more police in community policing and he’s worked with AmeriCorps to do it, and the crime rate in Kansas City has gone down as a result of what he did.

Cpl.  Gregory Depestre went to Haiti as part of his adopted country’s force to help secure democracy in his native land.  And I might add we must be the only country in the world that could have gone to Haiti and taken Haitian-Americans there who could speak the language and talk to the people, and he was one of them and we’re proud of him.

The next two folks I’ve had the honor of meeting and getting to know a little bit.  The Rev. John and the Rev. Diana Cherry of the A.M.E.  Zion Church in Temple Hills, Md.  I’d like to ask them to stand.  I want to tell you about them.  In the early 80’s they left Government service and formed a church in a small living room in a small house in the early 80’s.  Today that church has 17,000 members.  It is one of the three or four biggest churches in the entire United States.  It grows by 200 a month.

They do it together.  And the special focus of their ministry is keeping families together.  They are—­Two things they did make a big impression on me.  I visited their church once and I learned they were building a new sanctuary closer to the Washington, D.C., line, in a higher-crime, higher-drug-rate area because they thought it was part of their ministry to change the lives of the people who needed them.  Second thing I want to say is that once Reverend Cherry was at a meeting at the White House with some other religious leaders and he left early to go back to his church to minister to 150 couples that he had brought back to his church from all over America to convince them to come back together to save their marriages and to raise their kids.  This is the kind of work that citizens are doing in America.  We need more of it and it ought to be lifted up and supported.