Value

I am afraid that the more I learn in class, and the more academic things become, the further I am getting from the heart and from love.

Humanitarian workers and missionaries must go beyond "wanting to help," and learn how to be effective and avoid doing more harm than good. It's just that the more I learn to analyze situations and develop interventions, and the more I am crammed full of p-values and systems frameworks, the less it becomes about people.

Occasionally I catch moments of feeling: the professor who gets tears in his eyes while remembering a certain refugee camp in Rwanda; the professor who reminds us that one maternal death is too many; the one who chooses to say "deaths of newborns" instead of always "neonatal mortality."

We must remember. A maternal death is a woman who died during or soon after pregnancy. She is a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, a piece of her community. She is someone who gave and who received love. She has dignity that can't be taken away. There are deep consequences of her death. She is valuable.