corporate peace; aka doin' it for others what we can't do for ourselves

i promised myself a rant but i'm edging on tired right now and might not be able to thoughtfully complete this until a later date.

today i realized that a friend of mine is going to africa for the next 2 years to work, live, and help. it's not entirely clear what her role there will be, but she'll be in an impoverished village where electricity and running water will be scarce, and she's stocked up on hot showers in the days before leaving. more than likely she'll somehow devote most of her time to aids work - educating, care giving, spreading information, etc. i'm not entirely sure how the programs work, but i know from the peace corp website that in this part of africa, that's what they do there. other parts of the world are different.

knowing that over 70% of cases of aids in the world are in sub-saharan africa, it would seem they need as much help as they can get because clearly, something is not going right. the little that i know about the situation in the area is this: the us is providing minimal funding to help, and many cases are mis-diagnosed or undiagnosed due to lack of medical equipment.

all of this us sending peace workers to africa got me thinking about the other countries we're helping out. and after checking out a map, it would seem the countries we're helping are aplenty. thailand, the philipines, indonesia, china, the ukraine, the entire former soviet union, jordan, morocco, much of sub-saharan africa including south africa, sri lanka, much of south america, and the list goes on.

i know we have this big brother motif here in the states, and i know we have the audacity to think we're still the top of the planetary food chain in every aspect imaginable. but when i go to look at the facts, we find the us down at the bottom in so many areas, especially education. and when you really start digging for information you'll find that basically our education system is so flawed, that our kids are turning out dumb. embarrassing then, that we're sending them to help in countries that are actually showing to be smarter than we are.

i'll pull some facts together for us in my next post. i've got to get to sleep right now. my big american brain hurts from thinking too hard.