Thinking about Haiti

I've always avoided statements like "Children are the future" and "The children of today hold the answers tomorrow's greatest questions."  Really, they just seem a sappy statement of the obvious, kind of a nauseating, idealistic declaration.

However, over the weekend, those exact little sentences popped into my mind.  The earthquakes in Haiti have been weighing on me heavily.  I avoid media sensationalism, and so I really just have noted the bear facts for the week.  My imagination could fill in the morbid details without much difficulty at all.  Not long ago at all I was reading about the importance of not hiding the catastrophes of the world from your children and the need to use those terrible circumstances to teach your children empathy and motivate them to help people who need help.  So, when Ya Ya noticed pictures of Haiti on the news on my computer, we talked about what happened, about why it was in the news so much and what people were doing to help.  We talked about what wasn't working and why enough help wasn't getting to the people who needed it fast enough.  Ya Ya was very thoughtful.  She had questions.  And then she went away to play quietly.

In a few minutes, she was back at my desk.  "Why aren't they using all the helicopters in our country?  They could send all the helicopters.  Helicopters can land anywhere, and even if they couldn't land, they could drop down buckets of food and medicine on ropes, and they could even lift people who needed to be rescued out.  Even if it was only one person at a time and the work was slow, it would be better than just leaving them there."   

I was impressed.  I, stuck in my grown up box of what I was capable of doing and what I wasn't capable of doing, hadn't even thought of helicopters.  And while I'm sure that someone in charge had thought of helicopters and there were probably some good reasons why there weren't jillions of helicopters being used right then in Haiti, I certainly didn't know what those reasons were.  Ya Ya really cared about the situation and all weekend she was thinking about it.  Every so often she'd some back to me with another important detail about new ways they could be using the helicopters.  I loved watching her think through the problem in ways I just simply wouldn't have.  I was so glad I didn't just shuffle away from the website with disturbing news when she first noticed.