100

Started work at the Migrant Health Clinic today, and it was absolutely incredible. We'll see how I feel about it a week from now ;) but for now, I'm totally psyched to be going back tomorrow morning. More on that later, I guess, as I'd rather talk about something else.

Here I am, 99 posts from where this all began some 15 months ago. What is so important about a number, a collection of lines written on a page to record some quantity, some significance that may have been lost so many times before, like the repeating of a Telephone conversation down a line of unattentive, reckless, dangerously ignorant children. What does it all matter? It's a number. Just a facade of something, really. What does it matter, when I say the number 100? I could be talking about the number of schoolchildren killed when a Nigerian jetliner crashed Saturday night (Dec. 10) during a lightning storm. Or the number of people (many children, as well) that drowned after a ferry capsized near Dhaka, Bangladesh in spring 2003. Or I could be talking about the amount of money it would take to buy a salt and pepper set I saw at a store in the Galleria today. Or the number of loaves of bread and jugs of water that exact amount would buy a village in Sierra Leone.

Ridiculous, this thing called vanity. Why should I be priding myself on having written 100 of these meaningless things, when I could have donated what it takes to provide this internet connection, this laptop, this excessive comfort of which we are so accustomed. I sit here crying, not because I am feeling the horror and pain in which others live day to day, nor that I understand what the hungry, homeless and unsheltered go through. The greatest affliction is in knowing that some continue to overconsume and continue to expect that the world will keep providing for them the way in which they have been taught that they "deserve." This is the greatest threat to civilization: ungratefulness.

Of those that have been given great things, great things will be expected. So get ready.