Mr. President, I also rise to honor my Senator next door and my great colleague Senator Heitkamp. As you could see from her beautiful remarks, she is a person of true courage and strength and a friend to so many. We saw this strength when she was running for Governor while battling breast cancer. We saw it when she stood up for the people of North Dakota as their attorney general, and we see that courage every single day in the U.S. Senate, as she fights for the people of her State and the values that have defined her as a public servant. She is simply one of the best and one of a kind. Going forward, I hope that people will listen to the speech that she just gave about those seven generations, because that is service.

Hedi has always been true to herself and as mavericky as her red hair. When I walk into a room filled with dark suits and I see that red hair in the middle of it, I know where to go and exactly what I will find. There is her joy and her optimism, so much of it coming from growing up in a family of seven kids. There is her sense of humor, which I love, even when it is mixed with some serious trash talk, even when it is directed at my State next door. There is that friendship, which I treasure above all else. There is the example she sets of what one person can accomplish when you combine so much heart and fierce determination. We saw it with the human trafficking legislation that she talked about today. We saw it with her work on energy. We saw it with her work for her farmers. Thanks to leaders like Heidi, we are making progress on so many issues.

I will never forget the trip that I got to take to Mexico with Senator Heitkamp and Cindy McCain on human trafficking. One of the most memorable moments was when we visited a shelter of girls who had seen unspeakable tragedy. We met a little girl named Paloma. That means ‘‘dove’’ in Spanish. That girl, unlike the ones, didn’t say a word. All she did was cry. That is all she did. It made me think of what a refugee once said. She said that what she had seen in her life would make ‘‘stones cry.’’ I saw the tears going down Heidi’s face as that girl was just sitting there crying. Heidi just doesn’t watch that happen. She comes back, and she takes those tears and puts them into action. That girl had no voice. Heidi was her voice. She has done that time and again.

As she mentioned, everywhere you go in North Dakota, you practically meet a member of her family, and somehow they all look the same. There is also her wonderful husband Darwin, whom I adore. One of my favorite Darwin stories was the time when we took the first all-women Senators trip to Africa, and Heidi and I were sitting next to each other with some people out in the countryside, with the elders. On one side were all the women, with the women Senators, and on the other side were all the men. I turned to Heidi—because all of the elders were wearing these incredible hats and outfits—and I said: Who is the guy at the end with the baseball cap? She said: That is Darwin. There he was. He was always there, always there for her. So that is Heidi.

I will end with one story from that trip; that is, when we were in a hut in the middle of nowhere, and there was a woman who lived there, a widow, with her kids. We went into that hut, these women Senators, and started asking that woman who was so proud of everything she had done—all that was in this hut was one solar panel that she got for her work and one thing on the wall, which was a chart that showed all of the huts. It showed her with a star in the middle, and it showed how she had helped to make sure they had good hygiene and if they got baby care, as she was in charge of that. One of us asked this woman, who we had learned had walked every day, an hour and a half each day, to get water: What is your biggest challenge? This woman looked at these Senators and looked at this Senator with red hair from America and said: I have no challenges. I am a leader. That is Heidi Heitkamp. She is a leader. Whatever challenges she has overcome in her life—health, representing a State that isn’t always easy when you look at it politically for a Democrat, the challenges she had bucking our own party, taking things on—every single moment, she overcame those challenges because Heidi Heitkamp is a leader. I yield the floor.