Here is the heartbreaking side of things I have encountered: most of the students I have bonded with are due to begin school on Monday, Kyeune and Ochen in Senior 1, and eloquent Ruth to her last year of secondary school. None of them can go because they don’t have the school fees. They are bright, eager, full of hope and ideas, and stuck. Dammit. I believe that all of them will figure out something, some way of getting by in the world, but oh to be able to smooth it out for them, and the other millions who are still bright and eager. I go back to my easy life having offered something perhaps, yet not enough. I won’t resolve it for myself ever. Paige works daily in the complexities of the development/aid community—some successes occur, and then there’s stuff like people falsifying their HIV status in order to get the aid that the HIV positive people can get. It’s just hard to be close to the human face of need.

In contrast, yet curiously parallel, we just returned from an Africa-wide conference for seemingly well endowed high school students, encouraging leadership in service to the globe. The keynote speaker was Jane Goodall. Who was awesome and lovely. I would like her to be my mother. She spoke about the unflinching encouragement she got from her mother, as young Jane stayed on the quest for an “impossible” dream to go to Africa to study animals.

Here are Dr. Jane Goodall’s four reasons for hope:

* The energizing actions of youth all over the world as they seek to make changes for the better * The active human brain, coming up with technological and other kinds of solutions for the muddle we find ourselves in on the planet

* The resilience of Nature, the extraordinary tendency toward restoring the earth

* The indomitable human spirit, finding a way to survive and smile.

This hope takes her out 300 days a year to say this message to (us) young people around the globe. The leader of the Uganda branch of Roots & Shoots, the organization begun by Dr. Jane, said that they are trying to expand here because “We don’t want to deny people the opportunity to change the world.”

(The photo is Phil having just gotten Jane's autograph on the chimp photo he took. Cool. In person, she looks like every photo of her that I have seen at any age.)