Week1 : Is there a point?

The purpose of this blog is to keep track of my experience volunteering at a local clinic. I must admit I haven't really been rushing to sign up with a clinic. It's not nervousness or even laziness thats kept me from signing up becaus I know you exactly what I will do and see volunteering with a clinic. I've worked in a wide range of medical settings from a state of the art hospital like the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio(TX), to a run down hospital in Kisumu(Kenya) to a mud hut with a back pack filled with whatever surplus we had in our truck. Across the board it is always the same thing. Poverty results in a lot of people falling prey to needless(see preventable) disease such as tuberculosis, pneumonia or simple infection. And then corruption and money driven healthcare prevent the proper treatments(usually as simple as the proper antibiotic) from reaching those who can't afford it the most. I kind of went off on a tangent, so I'll skip to my point. A person could spend their entire life working and helping people in a low income health clinic but the amount of people you help will always be additive(1 person at a time) when the problems are growing exponentially. So while I like helping people, it never sits well that with each person I help, thousands more will go unhelped and so I try to spend my time working on ways to help groups not individual people.

Of course, I'm pretty sure the point of this assignment isn't to solve poverty or cure any major diseases. If I had to guess, the purpose is to expose us to how cellular disease works on a macro scale, or maybe just to broaden our points of view. I'm not too sure but I look forward to finding out.