I've spent a full yesterday thinking about this poor little baby girl, stuck in a cold glass and steel incubator with rubber tubes running in and out of her, restricting her movements. Bright lights piercing her eyes after 8 months in darkness, no one to hold her or give her comfort, lying there all alone. No parents to watch over her, doctors and nurses running in and out giving her an occasionally going over, methodical and detached. How lonely she must feel, cold. This is not the way a child should enter into this world.
It is not easy to remain detached emotionally. We do though on a day to day basis as we read the papers or watch the news. We have to. If we were to allow ourselves to dwell on the suffering of each individual child and adult every time we heard of a massacre or war or some other such atrocity., even if were just to think on the lonely and hurt children in the world, it would not be long before we were immobilized with grief.
Of course this is getting closer to us, a child's life crosses our path even it turned out briefly, and I can not help but to think on her and her loneliness. Frankly, I do not know how doctors or emergency personnel or relief workers do it, I could not. Perhaps that is why I am not. Can you be too sensitive to be a doctor? I actually had a friend once say "You'd make a great doctor, you are so sensitive". Perhaps that is just the wrong thing to be. It would paralyze me to see all those people in pain. What good of a doctor would I be then? Pretty useless. No, I guess I stick with DNA and protein sequences. Put them in an incubator and they multiply, they don't get cold and lonely and hurt.
You want to change the world, adopt every hurting and lonely child the world has to offer, but you can't. It is impossible. It will hurt enough if we couldn't adopt this poor child because it turned out we would have to be liable for the hospital bills (20,000 to 40,000 dollars) if the government doesn't pay. What will happen to this little girl then? Will she remain in the cold incubator only then to jump from foster home to foster home until she is an adult, never really knowing a loving home? Or will some wealthier parent or parents come to her rescue and give her a loving home? We can't think about these things. Or we'd have to try to think about all the world's children and go insane. We can't save, we can't change the world.
But, as my grandmom Lathe told me once,
you can't change the world, but you can change your world.
here's hoping we can change a small part of our world.
It is not easy to remain detached emotionally. We do though on a day to day basis as we read the papers or watch the news. We have to. If we were to allow ourselves to dwell on the suffering of each individual child and adult every time we heard of a massacre or war or some other such atrocity., even if were just to think on the lonely and hurt children in the world, it would not be long before we were immobilized with grief.
Of course this is getting closer to us, a child's life crosses our path even it turned out briefly, and I can not help but to think on her and her loneliness. Frankly, I do not know how doctors or emergency personnel or relief workers do it, I could not. Perhaps that is why I am not. Can you be too sensitive to be a doctor? I actually had a friend once say "You'd make a great doctor, you are so sensitive". Perhaps that is just the wrong thing to be. It would paralyze me to see all those people in pain. What good of a doctor would I be then? Pretty useless. No, I guess I stick with DNA and protein sequences. Put them in an incubator and they multiply, they don't get cold and lonely and hurt.
You want to change the world, adopt every hurting and lonely child the world has to offer, but you can't. It is impossible. It will hurt enough if we couldn't adopt this poor child because it turned out we would have to be liable for the hospital bills (20,000 to 40,000 dollars) if the government doesn't pay. What will happen to this little girl then? Will she remain in the cold incubator only then to jump from foster home to foster home until she is an adult, never really knowing a loving home? Or will some wealthier parent or parents come to her rescue and give her a loving home? We can't think about these things. Or we'd have to try to think about all the world's children and go insane. We can't save, we can't change the world.
But, as my grandmom Lathe told me once,
you can't change the world, but you can change your world.
here's hoping we can change a small part of our world.
