This was a business travel weekend for me. What with one thing and another, things didn?t play out as originally planned, and instead of coming back Sunday, I spent Monday in transit from point A to point B, and not at home helping to ensure that our personal assorted trains run on time.
A few weeks ago, Bruce Feiler challenged me not to make elaborate plans surrounding my occasional absences. Real co-parents, he argued (and we certainly consider ourselves that), can jump in and take over for one another. That?s true, and yet we scrambled, pulling together after-school care, forgetting that one child had a friend coming over (doesn?t work with the last-minute babysitter) and, worst of all, the child discovered at 7:10 a.m., working away on her first-grade ?superstar? week poster and confidently expecting her dad to provide ?10 to 15 family pictures? help, and breakfast.
None of that has anything much to do with which of us ?co-parents? is at home. Had my husband been unexpectedly delayed, the balls we dropped would have been different (and the guilt maybe less, but that?s a different discussion). The long and the short of it is that we?ve designed our lives around? having two parents around for the juggling, ferrying and superstar of the week-ing, and when one of us is gone, the other has a hard time maintaining the flow.
Which makes some of the parents I met in the course of my travels all the more admirable. The United Nations? Foundation invited nearly 100 advocates for global vaccination to come to Washington, D.C. to learn more about the issue, be trained in media outreach and fundraising, and then to visit Capitol Hill and meet with their Senate and House representatives. Some were experienced lobbyists (in the advocacy sense, rather than the don?t-make-laws-that-limit-our-products sense; others would be shaking hands with a representative? or a senator for the first time that day.
Some were single, and some students or health professionals ? but many were, whatever else they also were, parents, and none were being paid to take this time from their lives and pack themselves up and navigate trains and planes and automobiles (after a storm that turned many a journey John Candy-esque) to come to Washington, put a Shot@Life T-shirt on under a suit jacket, and walk into a Congressional office to ask for support for funding to vaccinate children worldwide against common childhood diseases from polio to tetanus to measles.
The basics of the Shot@Life campaign are simple: 1.5 million children die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Those deaths are concentrated in countries where children are unlikely to make it to a doctor or hospital, making vaccines especially important ? prevention saves money and lives in places where what we would consider basic medical treatment isn?t always available. The pitch to Congress is simple, too: vaccinating children early saves billions in international health care spending down the road.
What isn?t simple is the funding conundrum faced by Congress now, as sequestration approaches: most people, politicians and constituents alike, agree that there needs to be cuts to the federal budget. The question before Congress is what to cut, and who will feel it, and global health aid is, like everything else, on the table. In 2012, Americans estimated that the United States spent 27 percent of its budget on foreign aid. In truth, that number is around one percent. When given that information, a majority of Americans responding to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey opinion shifted their opinion from saying the current level of spending is too high to being most likely to say spending is currently too low. (And spending on global health programs makes up only a small part of that one percent.)
But perception is everything, and cuts to foreign aid may play better in some communities than cuts to domestic programs or defense spending. If the cuts projected as a result of sequestration take place, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (C.B.P.P.) has estimated that they will lead to a 5.1 percent across-the-board funding cut to most non-defense discretionary programs. That cut to foreign aid could mean that 805,200 fewer vaccines for children will be available, leading to 8,500 more deaths from preventable diseases.
So you could say that those volunteer travelers were there on behalf of those 8,500 children, and all of the others who are helped by the United States? commitment to global health initiatives. (I should be clear that I was not one of those who traveled for this purpose.) Many of the parents I met could have simplified their lives significantly by staying home. Jess from Blog of a Blue Grass Belle left her 3-year-old son for the first time. Danielly from Un Dolce Hogar, Adventure Mom?s Kathy Dalton, the pediatrician Natasha Burgert, Yolanda Gordon and Jennifer Stanton, mothers and impassioned advocates? ? I met parent after parent who?d found child care or left spouses solo to make this trip. Most were mothers, but a number of fathers stood proudly among them. Altogether, they reminded more than 80 congressional offices that many Americans don?t just support aid for global vaccination campaigns, they?re willing to go more than a few extra miles to prove it.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business-travel-for-a-cause-admirable-still-painful/
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