Why Volunteer
About 30 years ago, man was able to take a distant glance at our planet and take it for what it really is─one world, orbiting in space. Alas, amidst the difficulties and contradictions of the human social order, it’s still easy to forget that we are all in one world, working interdependently. Drastic imbalances of wealth and opportunity separate us. The lives of a deprived family in Gambia or Bangladesh couldn’t seem more distant from the lives of a wealthy family in Tokyo or San Francisco.
When it comes to health, these disparities become appalling. Infectious diseases that have been extinguished in more privileged nations continue to plague millions in less fortunate nations─diseases that can be easily prevented with a safe drug or a vaccine. Infant mortality, in a developed country is looked upon as a rare, tragic event; in an under developed country infant mortality stands as an ordinary, everyday occurrence. In some areas, two in five children dies before age five.
Inequity is running rampant throughout this world and we need to put it to a halt. The modern marvels of medicine should be open to all, as opposed to a privileged few. The mission to give everyone on the planet a fair chance at a healthy life is awfully complex. It takes science, economics, politics, ethics, environmentalism, psychology, culture, education, activism, and much more. The work requires the cooperation of an astonishingly diverse group of people─from microbiologists and pharmaceutical scientists to statisticians and community activists, from epidemiologists tracking the footprints of a new disease to barefoot volunteers bringing vaccines into remote rainforests.
Public health is conducted at the highest levels of government and in the most remote rural villages, by some of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists and some of the poorest people on the planet. Unifying all of these efforts is the simple belief that every single human life matters. All people should have access to the basic essentials of good health, whoever they are, wherever they were born. Those of us with the ability to provide life-saving vaccines and medications to the world’s least fortunate—and to conduct research and develop new medicines—can and should do much more.
