There is a quote by Joan Beck who is a well known child psychologist. “You start by loving. Loving a child won’t solve all her problems, but unless you start by loving, nothing else will ever help enough”.

I wish I could fix the world. I have traveled a great deal, and there are certain feelings and images I will never forget. I will never forget going to an orphanage in China, and holding a little 3 year old child who had a cleft lip. I remember being in Nigeria, and discovering a woman was HIV positive, before I looked down at her little two year old girl. It breaks my heart to think of that Chinese orphan and the HIV positive mother with her child.

I remember when I first began studying International Development. I had such optimistic idealisms that I would now learn the tools needed to solve world problems, and how great of a person I would be to fix the world’s pain. It’s funny how I dove into my college education thinking I would come out with a bunch of smart answers to the world’s problems. But now, 6 years later I realize that I haven’t found what I thought I was looking for. Instead, I’ve learned how to be humble in the face of humanitarian suffering, and admit that I don’t have answers. It hurt for me to realize that the word “fix” couldn’t really be applied to humanitarian issues I cared about.

Despite how much I had studied about facilitating holistic community development, and how much I had learned about technological transference to lesser developed nations, there was nothing I could do for that young boy whose parents had abandoned him for his deformity. There was nothing I could do to take back the awful virus that had unjustly been delivered to an innocent woman, and possibly her baby girl. Nothing I could do that is, except to give my love.

You start by loving, says Joan Beck. We won’t always know how much or little we can do for a person. The world is an unpredictable place, but the one constant that helps me cope with unanswerable suffering is that no matter what, I can always love. I could try to show that little Chinese boy that despite what his parents did to him, he still mattered to the world. I could hold the hand of that woman, and try to let her know that HIV did nothing to decrease her value and beauty as a person.

It’s the small things that make the world go round. But it takes all the small things put together to make the biggest changes. One raindrop raises the ocean. I cannot do much when I look at everything that needs to be healed, but my work is no longer about everything. It’s about all the “I love you”s I can give to other people, to let them know that despite how much the world hurts them, they still matter. I cannot fix the world, but I can give drops of love to help raise an ocean of change.