How often have you heard people say, or said yourself, "Oh, I could never do that."
In the course of showing my photos of the Congo to friends, I've heard more than one person say those words, or words like them. My friends seem to think they could never survive being shot in the leg, or that they could never build and live in their own grass and reed hut, or collect water and food every day in order to prepare that day's meals.
My friends are wrong, of course. Hundreds of millions of people do those things every day, because if you have no choice ... you have no choice.
Are we in the developed world "soft"? Yes, most of us are. We worry about trivia, because we have nothing worse to worry about. We convince ourselves we can't do things, because, if the going gets too tough we can always climb back into our BMWs and Audis, turn up the heater (and CD player), pick up a coffee at Starbucks, and have a hot shower when we get home, before deciding between ordering Chinese or pizza for dinner.
When you have no choice, things are simpler. If you have to collect 20 liters of water per day per person in your family, you know you need to wake up early and get moving with that 5-liter jug. If your child is sick and the nearest health clinic or hospital is 20 kilometers away, and there are no buses or other transport, you know you need to start walking.
If you had to run out of your house right now because drugged and drunken gunmen were attacking your community, indiscriminately spraying automatic weapons fire, and you had to hide in the woods for three days without food, returning to find that your home had been burned to the ground and you'd been left with nothing but the clothes on your back, could you handle that? You probably could.
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