Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Scholar Warrior Citizen Day 2

Tuesday was in many ways the hardest of our Scholar Warrior Citizen days. Tuesday was the day we looked at medical care. Our students learned how many people, whether due to poverty, isolation or disaster (including war) have no access to medical care.

What makes this hard is...they get it. These kiddoes, most in 2nd-4th grade, understand how awful that must be. A few of them have experienced it first hand, but all of them have the empathy to feel it for a moment or two.

We wrapped it up with a tour of the Medical Teams International world headquarters. MTI is a group that sends teams of doctors, nurses and paramedics to disaster areas, war zones and refugee camps. If Master McNeil hadn't already used the 'organization as hero' idea, I'd put these folks on my list of heroes in a heartbeat. They give up a lot to make a real difference in the world.

Define victory. They have a display in their museum that used to say 'a child dies of a preventable illness every 3 seconds'. Sometime recently, somebody crossed out the 3 with a sharpie pen and wrote in 3.6.

It's a start, I guess.

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