Gymno

succumbing to peer pressure

Monday, August 15, 2005

The Conference - Doctors for Global Health

I first found out about this group from one of my profs, and ten minutes into their annual meeting last year I thought to myself, My people! It was amazing to be in a room full of such idealistic, dedicated people. The conference is always about equal parts inspiration and feelings of unworthiness, but I think this time around the inspiration outweighed the guilt.

This marked the tenth anniversary of DGH, so the meeting opened with a retrospective of how it all began - with Lannie Smith helping to build the Jaime Solorzano Bridge in Morazan, El Salvador, so that people would not have to swim across a river to go to school or the local clinic or simply cross to the other side of town (the bridge is named afte a medical student who drowned crossing the river).

There was recognition of the 60th anniversary of the US dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (140,000 individuals died within the first 6 months, 160,000 additional deaths over time as a result of fallout; many third generation civilians are still suffering adverse health affects linked to the bombs).

Charlie Clements was our first keynote speaker, who offered up this quote from the Talmud:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Walk humbly now. Do justly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

He talked of his work in El Salvador, of how people would simply disappear off the streets after attending union meetings or discussions about social justice.

He was a member of the air force and flew combat missions during the Vietnam war, but when he refused to participate in the invasion of Cambodia he was declared 10% mentally disabled, which he says used to bother him until he realized that also meant he was 90% intact!

One of the conference attendees from Uganda offered this sobering statistic - in Uganda there are approximately 25,000 individuals for every one doctor.

Our second keynote speaker was Kathy Kelly, an old school hippie/activist. She's pretty extreme, but also a damn entertaining speaker. She told stories about various times spent in prison and getting shunted around Iraq and Jordan by the Iraqi government and being able to bring small medical supplies (bandages, disinfectant, etc.) across the border prior to and during the first Gulf War, but being prevented by UN sanctions to bring powdered milk.

She said that when trucks full of supplies for US soldiers broke down, as they often did on hot desert roads, the soldiers guarding the trucks were ordered to abandon them, but first to burn the contents. Burn the contents! How can we be so wasteful? (and we're not talking military supplies, like ammunition here. they were burning food and shelter items)

She says that roughly 60% of the water in rural areas and 20% of the water in urban areas in Iraq today is contaminated.

She spoke of politicized compassion, which I think is a good focusing phrase. She advised us to find non-violent ways of action that are more commensurate to the crimes that are being committed. The 'bitter pill' as she put it was to ask two questions - What does this government want from us? (money) What can we control? (our own personal budget)

The last day of the conference I scribbled this in my notebook:
If you ever wonder what happened to the hippies, they're here. The best thing about this conference is the middle-aged and older members. These grandparent-looking, sweet, grey-haired individuals, with stories about time in jail, time in developing countries, digging latrines, dealing with military outfits. And I'm the one who's afraid. Sixty-year-old, smallish women spend months working in El Salvador and I think I can't. I need to get over that.

Which was, to some extent, the beginning of the conversation with Carrie. I just came away from last weekend thinking it's time to get out of here, to spend some real time somewhere else, to actually do more. I agree with Carrie that it's a dangerous slope from being willing to take risks for the things you believe in and being all about the risks you've taken rather than the work you've done. But I'm so afraid of resting on my laurels. I'm so afraid of being self-congratultory because sometimes I call my representatives in congress and knock on a few doors and write a few checks. I'm so afraid that my ideals, since they've never really been tested, won't stand up to testing. It's far too easy to sit in my white, upper-middle class, highly educated world and say things about social justice and right and wrong and the way things should be. I like to think that if it came down to it, I believe in the things I believe in enough that I would make sacrifices for them. If potential jail time is the consequence of conscientious objection, I should be realistic about that possibility. Sid talks about sometimes feeling that it's his duty to serve in the military. I wonder if I believe in anything enough to risk my life for it? I hope that I do...But I just don't know.

I don't want to make sacrifices for the sake of sacrificing something. I would love it if I could work for social justice all my life and never really risk much...but I would hate it if I avoided doing something that was well within my capabilities simply because I was afraid.

Luke 12:48: "To those to whom much is given, much is required."

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what would you do if you weren't afraid? And when?
-Haley

11:41 PM  
Blogger Megan said...

It's not so much that I'm not doing things because I'm afraid right now, it's more hypothetical. For example, I'm a strong supporter of the right to choose. I'm hoping this year to have time to train as an escort at clinics. But if at some point in the future abortion becomes illegal, or clinic violence steps up, will I still have the strength of my convictions to continue being an escort? I don't know. Like I said, on a day to day basis, my life is such that it's pretty easy to believe in the things I believe in.

7:01 PM  
Blogger Megan said...

I definitely have not lost my faith that grad school matters or that statistics matters or any of that...perhaps I'm not expressing myself clearly. It's not that I think what I'm doing now isn't important or that I think I have to die or otherwise suffer for my work to matter. It's that given that, thus far, doing my work has been 'easy' (relatively speaking...and perhaps this summer excluded) I sometimes catch myself wondering if I would still do this sort of work if it were less easy (see example re: abortion above). I don't particularly want to find out the answer to that question through trial and tribulation, but it is nonetheless a question I find popping up in my mind more and more lately.

I do think that I can make a difference with statistics; I came to this profession as the best possible combination I could find of my particular talents and potential opportunities to enact positive change. My faith in that hasn't faltered...I suppose it's my faith in myself to do the right thing when the right thing is hard to do that has slipped a bit.

11:30 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, since you cite me, I feel like I ought to comment.

So, I too had a (extended) moral quandry about what my obligations were... how much I should/ought to endanger myself to support those things which I held to be important. What helped a lot was a conversation with this rabbi I ran into on campus. He talked a bit about Halakha, or rabbinical law, which I actually knew a fair bit about.

Anyhow, one thing he told me that I didnt know was that jews were allowed to break halakha if their lives are in jeopardy. Eating pork, for example, incurs no sin if a person is holding a gun to your head and demanding that you do it. When life is endangered, all religious laws may be totally disregarded.

Dunno if that helps you, but it did make me feel a bit better. God loves life, he loves your life, and God surely won't hold it against you if you hesitate to make that sort of sacrifice. Heck, he encourages you not to, because sooner or later, what is right should win out. Confronting violence now (and endangering yourself) may speed the process, but it makes it no less inevitable.

For what its worth, I'd bet even money that you'd do something ridiculously dangerous if you thought it was the right (and necessary) thing to do.

12:39 PM  
Blogger Megan said...

I appreciate the worry (and that my friends have more faith in me than I do at the moment!). C - I know I came back from the conference all gung ho about things, but realistically, I'm not going to take time off to go to language school and jaunt off to another country for a year. I'd like to, but it's not in the cards. And though it may have sounded otherwise, because there is a twinge of guilt in there, mostly it's inspiration and motivation - I want to get out of here partly to re-charge, not as something else to stress me out. I think that at some point, having something more tangible to point to, may help a little on the bad days when I've been staring at an excel spreadsheet for hours.

Even though I think statistics can help to save the world, it's also pretty easy when staring at numbers all day to forget that there are real people behind those numbers. I would like to find a way to have some more experiences with those real people.

1:02 PM  

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