So, I spent Saturday volunteering at a fund-raiser for CNIS, a darn nice bunch of people doing darn nice things for other darn nice people who really need as much help as they can get. One of the obstetricians who works with the group saw more women die in one day working in an obstetrics clinic in Africa than she'd seen in her entire 20 year career here in Vancouver. Given that she'd seen exactly none, here, that number wouldn't need to be too high, but it was around 16 (as far as I recall). And she kept seeing that sort of rate for the entire time she was over there. That's a lot of suffering brought on by nothing but poverty and all the things that denies people - education, decent medical equipment, drugs....