David Oliver Relin (co-author of Three Cups of Tea) came to speak at our campus last night. I took seven pages of notes, and even that was only an overview of what he said. What he's reporting on is so profound that one would need hours to document it -- or, of course, a full-length book.

My school's Class of 2014 (and I still cringe every time I read that) theme is "Our Global Community." And Relin captured that in his speech quite well. He said that when he graduated from college, his parents' graduation gift to him was a plane ticket to anywhere in the world. He took it and went to India, and almost immediately spent most of his money on a motorcycle. Not a good motorcycle, mind you, but a terrible one which things fell off of about every fifty miles. Consequently, he was constantly breaking down in front of people's homes. And they would come out and tie together the bits of his bike again with a bit of twine or a piece of duct tape, and then they'd invite him in for tea. And this is when he decided what he wanted to do with his life: travel, and be a journalist.

So he went back to New York to get started on his sure-to-be illustrious journalism career, but every time he pitched a story in which he would drive a motorcycle across Africa and talk to people about AIDS, he was given a story about a movie star or an athlete. His first freelance job was an article for Reader's Digest on how to refinish wood flooring. Needless to say, he was feeling a little unfulfilled. And then he went to see Grace Paley speak. She said many things, among which were "stop taking yourself so seriously," "get engaged," and his favorite, "I believe it's the duty of the writer to listen to the stories of the powerless and tell those stories to the powerful." And thus he got the push he needed to really freelance.

He started soon after the September 11th attacks, when he was beginning to get frustrated with how Muslims were being treated in the US. Muslims do not equal terrorists, he says, and their lives were routinely turned upside down by extremists too. Relin says terrorism is only the symptom, but the real disease is poverty and ignorance. And this was when he got involved with Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute.

While talking about this, he got caught up in a bunny trail that I thought was one of the most important parts of his speech. He went to Vietnam to report on landmines in the early years of his journalism career. He said that there were more bombs and munitions dropped during that war than any other time in history, and because of that children are still losing limbs to those bombs. Because of the time I've spent in Croatia, where the war was so recent, I'm fairly aware of attempts to clean up the landmines. But it's unbelievable to me that thirty-five years later no one is capable of going through and cleaning up the mess we made.

In any case, he went on to say that he went to Mount Everest (and we all know I perked up immediately when I heard that, allergies or no) to do a story on Apa Sherpa and Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who set the records for number of times summitted (20) and speed of ascent (10 hours and 47 minutes) respectively.

While there, he ran into Dr. Geoff Tabin. Tabin attended Yale, Harvard medical school, and Oxford, climbed the last unclimbed face of Everest, was the fourth man to climb the Seven Summits, and invented bungee jumping. Oh, and basically because he was bored, he decided to cure preventable blindness.

There are about 100 million people around the world who are blind and don't have to be - the only problem is the cost. Tabin cut the cost down to $15 a patient, and the length of the surgery to six minutes. Every day, people flock to the village that he's working in that day. They come in totally blind, and the next day they leave with 20/20 vision. For $15 a person.

He said a lot more that I'll cover later, probably, but I thought that was so powerful. And I don't know why people aren't focusing on things like this, and like Mortenson's Central Asia Institute, and like preventing children from getting their limbs blown off by landmines. We get so worked up about politics and money and things that don't matter - my favorite twitter hashtag is #firstworldproblems. I know that I'm part of the problem, going to an expensive school in an expensive town wearing expensive clothes and eating organic food, but I'm trying to help. I'm donating money. I'm donating clothes. I have made some impassioned speeches. And there are so many people that aren't doing anything. And I just don't understand that.

It's always frustrated me that ageism doesn't seem to apply when talking about people younger than 25. I am certainly not saying that youth is more important than age, or that young people are better. But there's an inherent implication in everything that's said about college and high school students that they're still searching. They don't know what they want. They get taken up in silly philosophical questions. They're convinced that their love will last.

As if just because the person in question is twenty rather than forty means that their love won't last, or their philosophical ideas aren't fully formed and rational, or their sexuality is necessarily more fluid.

Of course I don't think college students are the smartest people I've ever met. A lot of people make really stupid decisions. A lot of people can't seem to figure out how to use commas, for God's sake. But those decisions aren't inherently less important. People that are forty and eighty make equally stupid decisions, except that it's assumed there's some sort of reasoning behind it - or, of course, that they're senile.

There is certainly ageism on both sides. But please consider what you're doing before the next time you roll your eyes and say, "well, they're 'in love,' of course, but they're freshmen, so..." Love is what you think it is at the time. Philosophy is what is important to you at the time. Decisions always matter, now matter how old you are when you make them.