I'm having trouble seeing past this plank!

"In America, people are 90% living and 10% surviving. Most of the rest of the world is 10% living and 90% surviving," my friend quoted to me the other day. That's what her dad says, she tells me. She spent some time surviving in Eastern Africa - helping doctors, doing whatever aid work she could.

Another friend of mine lived in Micronesia for 2 years. As part of her JVI experience, she tried to live in solidarity with the people and to strive for "simple living." She succeded in these: Coming back to the states left her in a bit of a reverse culture shock.

Yesterday a story was posted on the Pwoje Espwa blog about the latest additions to the Espwa family. The entry reads:

Meet the newest members of the family, Rolider and David Smith.
Their story is too common. The boys had been having stomach problems for
sometime but their family had no money to pay for a visit to the hospital.
Rather than watch the boys suffer their mother made the only choice she could,
take her children to the hospital and abandon them there, hoping and praying
someone would come to their aid. Thankfully Agnes Fednor of Terre de Hommes,
another relief agency in the area, found them, paid for their medical treatment
and watched over them during their hospital stay. After a week Agnes brought the
boys to us and asked if we could take them in. Rolider and David are now
continuing to recover in our care and should be ready to start school next week.
Please keep Rolider and David in your prayers, and especially their mother who
was faced with a choice no one should ever have to make.

Surviving in Haiti will mean changing my frame of reference, my expectations for a "good" day, my capacity to love, my perceptions of reality. We got it so good in this country...

photograph of Micronesian kids taken by Ashley