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Saturday, May 15, 2004 Gary Jules is coming to Boston the night before my DiffEq exam. @#*%&* I didn't work at all last night, so I should've just gone to see Jump (formerly jump little children). :-/ ===== At this point, I highly doubt if we'll top $400-ish for the victims of Ryongchon, North Korea, but I'm fairly satisfied with how things are going. Some people stopped by our booth and didn't donate, but they did read our posters. And if they walked away more informed than they were before, then I can't consider this whole effort a waste of time. I wish that this could have been a part of a broader campaign to increase awareness about everything going on in North Korea, but that just wasn't feasible in the course of 2 weeks... next term presents an uphill challenge as well but one that I'll try to undertake nonetheless. I don't blame people that avoided me as I handed out Uno's tickets, because when I'm really stressed I can see myself doing the same. What does sadden me, however, is that I didn't see a single Korean person who didn't personally know someone involved with our fundraiser, approach our table. Now, perhaps they already donated, but I highly doubt that. This especially goes for the grad students-- when we asked for their help, their stock answer was "sure, we'll try to do our best". They haven't contacted us since. Yet for everyone that ignored me, there was one person who would seem or who I knew was especially concerned and definitely took time out to think about what was going on. Some of these people are planning to make relief work, etc., a career; some just like to put their money (and time and consideration) where their mouth is (instead of like some people who mouth off about Korean pride and then fail to support their fellow Koreans); and some people are just good-hearted souls. One person who stands out in my mind is someone European who stopped by our booth 3 times to pick up 3 tickets, 2 of the others to bring to his colleagues. And the most recent surprise was an email from the MIT Persian Students' Association that they've informed their constituents about our efforts as well. So, although I still think the world is filled with blockheads and selfish people-- some because circumstance has understandably left them no choice, and others because hypocrisy somehow became an accepted part of civilization somewhere along te way-- I guess there's still hope yet. That's truly heartening to know. ==== To steal a quote from the profile of everyone's favorite "Egg" (Adam), "A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead For better or worse, I think we only need to look around us to know it's true. --posted by M @ 1:38 PM | 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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