Insh'allah

We watched Nature on PBS in my home when I was growing up.

I remember seeing a show in which a species of desert ant was described. This ant often worked during the day and had very long legs to keep it just a bit farther away from the scorching sands it skittered across in completion of its ant-ly missions.

Because of the amouint of work in such an intense environment, said Nature, the worker ants lasted only for 3 days. A lifetime spelled out by two or three cycles of light and dark. They literally burned out. Three days in which to expend their energies and do all their work.

Tonight,
after music in the canyon,
I sat around a table, discussing various issues - biking, computers and internet services, particular economic spheres, etc - with 3 white male Americans whom I'd only known to any significant degree in the last year or two. It occurred to me that it was the first time that I was consciously aware that by no prior organization, each of us had spent time in a 3rd-world ...or, Developing, if you will,... country, not in North America, and understood the conditions, difficulties, and aspirations of an entirely different, high-poverty people group.

All around the table, we were privileged white American college students,
but we were privileged white American college students with a social conscience, with an intention to create and direct the future for ourselves and for others, with opinions about where we were and where we could go as well as what should be avoided.

We are talented, smart, well-intentioned, with a vision of the kind of changes we'd like to see in society,...

And I thought there had to be more of us out there.
Somewhere else, there are talented, smart college students with an understanding of another culture, another class, of poverty and progress in other countries and in their own. They are poised on the lip of something great and mobile for the world. We are. And with enough people on this edge of power and responsibility, bringing with them a social consciousness and understanding of the experience in other countries,
this is something great.



My prayer tonight,
which tonight feels more like a desperate hope,
is that I will be granted enough time to use the skills I already have,
and develop the talents I do not yet have,
for the greatest possible good.

There is both so much,
and still so little time
in which to expend my energy.

God willing,
no part of me shall go to waste.