future humanitarian aid worker?

Before anything else, I'm going to launch into a little rant about how incredibly idiotic Blogger is- like how it refuses to change my blog layout and how it keeps telling me that I have a problem with my cookies and/or my Javascript settings when I DON'T. I've got this cute little martini layout, not that I've ever drunk one in my life, and I CAN'T FREAKING SEE IT. I call that incredibly unfair, sorry if I've someone offended someone's sensibilities.

BUT anyway.

I was reading National Geographic, like I mostly always do, and the one of the features was on aid work. And I guess that really brought home the point to me, why I'm doing medicine, what's my goal in life. It's a pretty moving article, must say. The photographer was brilliant, for one thing, and the images were very apt and poignant. I'm just waiting for the day I can submit my application to Doctors Without Borders, or more appropriately, Médecins Sans Frontières. (The French were the originators of this organisation. Good on them.) To fulfill a dream, a vocation. I just really don't want to be one of those people that do med or dent or physio or whatever solely for the money and the prestige of having what they term a "gold-plated job". I don't want to finish for the sake of an obscenely high starting salary, or the right to put "Dr." in front of my name in a nice plate on my nice oak door, or for all the little letters I can insert behind my name to impress brownnosing buffons. I don't want to sit on my ass all day, only getting up periodically to give insecure beautiful women breasts the size of soccer balls and watching little slips of paper (read: money) slide across the desk. Damn it, I want to do something worthwhile with what I have, and I despise those self-important puffballs out there who do it for the sake of wearing a new shiny namebadge and the right to beep into rooms with the sign "Authorised Personnel Only".

I'm doing it so that I can make a difference. I'm going to be a humanitarian aid worker. So what if I get shot. At least I tried.