Ah yes, a lot of time has passed since I last posted and I have to admit that I’ve been a little busy. I’ve been perusing the MCAT forum on SDN and I found out that the August 2005 MCAT scores will be viewable online on October 14, 2005!!!I’m actually really excited but also scared at the same time. I’ve told a lot of my friends that I don’t want to know their scores and I won’t tell them mine. This may seem weird by I just can’t see how any of the “What did you get?” conversations would turn out well. Either someone is going to have a higher score than me, and I’ll feel inadequate, or I’ll have a higher score than them and they’ll feel bad. I’m pretty sure its not that serious, but I’m an obsessive pre-med so you have to expect that from me.
Anyway, school is going pretty well so far. I missed the mission trip with NAPS (The National Association for the Prevention of Starvation) when they went to Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina; so when Hurricane Rita was looming I promised myself I would make that one. So we left last Saturday night and came back this Thursday and it was a truly amazing and blessing experience. We went down to Lake Charles, Louisiana and truly it just seems like the poor get the bad end of the stick during disasters. I’ll give you a couple of examples:
First of all, a lot of the poor neighborhoods had trees down on their houses, no power, etc. The thing about the trees was that in the upper class neighborhoods, the Asplunde trucks (a company that clears trees) were busying clearing up the neighborhoods while the poor neighborhoods had nothing.
Another bad thing was that in a lot of the poor neighborhoods, the local officials had cut off the water in the area before the hurricane hit in order to conserve water. But when Hurricane Rita hit, a lot of the water reservoirs were destroyed. So basically the people in these neighborhoods had no water before, during, or after the hurricane hit. That really broke my heart.
Another really frustrating thing we noticed was that there were cops at every exit into Lake Charles, and they weren’t letting residents back into the area. So if there was a tree on their house, and it rained then everything inside their house also would get destroyed. Now they did this to everyone but the problem is, is that most of the poor can’t afford insurance, so if everything inside their house is destroyed, they’ve lost everything they owned, while the upper class can just get an insurance check to cover it all.
Honestly, this isn’t a white/black thing, it’s a poor vs. rich thing, and its sad that its taking place in this country.
Well, anyway, besides all that, the gratitude that was shown by the people we helped was just amazing. The Lord opened up so many doors its was just amazing. As we were driving down there, we were listening to the news and all we heard was how there were cops at every exit and they were even turning away even Red Cross trucks. Sometimes the devil tries to discourage you when you are trying to do the Lord’s work, and we realized that, so we kept driving. When we got to the exit for Lake Charles we stopped, showed the cops our school identification cards, and they stepped back, saluted us, and waved us in. Now trust me, we are much smaller than the Red Cross but it just goes to show you how the Lord will work things out. So yeah, we go in to Lake Charles and the damage was pretty extensive. We drove into one of the poor neighborhoods, broke out the chain saws, and started cutting trees off peoples houses. The hugs and the tears from the people really made it all worth while. We drove through a middle class neighborhood, and we saw humongous tree in this couple’s roof. The husband was just standing outside shaking his head. We jumped out (all 30 of us) and started helping him cut down the tree. He told us that what would have taken him 3 weeks to do, we did in 2 hours, and he was so happy. The wife was so elated that she immediately started calling all of her friends and testifying. She was saying, “My husband and I didn’t know what to do with this tree in our house. We didn’t have any money to pay people to take it out, and the tree was causing more and more damage the longer it laid on top of our house. We didn’t know what to do, and all of a sudden these angels from Huntsville, Alabama arrived and truly came to our rescue.” She said more, but you basically get the point. The gratitude was so genuine, and it just reassured us that we did the right thing in leaving school and coming down there to help.
We also hooked up with the group called the Convoy of Hope, and worked with them. Basically they set up in a Wal-Mart parking lot and passed out a certain amount of ice, water, and food to each car. Their intentions were pure, but once again the poor got the short end of the stick. You see, they only give out a certain amount of water, and ice per car. But most of the poor people with no cars, have to catch a ride with their friends. So, many cars pulled up with two families represented but the Convoy of Hope was only allowed to give water enough for one family. On the flip side, we noticed that there were families with 2 or 3 cars, and they brought all the cars in order to get as much as they could. So really the haves got more, and the haves not got nothing. Besides that, many were blessed.
Honestly, I think my perspective is really changing on what I want to do. If someone gave you a week and $1,000, and they told you that if you invested wisely, they would give you $100 trillion dollars, how would you spend that week? I kind of look at life in the same way. How many years am I going to have on this earth; 90, maybe 100 years? How many years is eternity? Me being a logical person, it seems to me that if God gave me 90 years, and depending on how I spend those 90 years, I can have eternity; I think I should spend those 90 years working to get eternity. Saying all that; I’m really trying to figure out how to use my future M.D. degree to serve the Lord; simple as that. I don’t just want to go to school to learn how to treat the only 7% of the world’s population that can afford medical care. I want to learn also how to be out there in the jungles of Brazil, the rice fields of China, or the rural areas of Africa, treating people also. I don’t know, it just seems like the traditional medical training in America doesn’t really prepare you to help people out on the mission field. Now I’m not saying that I’m going to change my focus and because some naturalist. But I think it would be nice if you learned out to treat people when we don’t have any outlet to plug your EKG machine or your MRI machine in.
Ok, now that I’ve gotten that off of my mind.
I’m doing fine at this point. I’ll probably have much more to post once MCAT scores come out on the 14th. I’ll be a little scared to post them on here since, some of my classmates may secretly be reading my online diaries, lol. Anyway, until them…Peace.
Leave a Reply