He Said She Said

I spent Saturday afternoon volunteering at a medical clinic located inside a homeless shelter. Shortly after leaving, I began thinking about my experience and what I now consider to be the most basic human right. Here is a list of other important human rights.

I believe the most basic human right is the right to serve others. Serving others is what is best about being human. A man came into the clinic today in the midst of an asthmatic exacerbation. (Note: some of the details of this story have been changed.) He was in immediate distress and could barely talk due to his labored breathing. From his few words we surmised that he ran out of his inhaler medication. Fortunately, we had just the thing he needed and a few minutes later he was cracking jokes and we were laughing. The man had recently lost his job. Without our clinic he would have continued to suffer through his asthmatic attack or been forced into an ER trip that would have resulted in hundreds of dollars in fees for something that was easily corrected.

This is just one small example of serving others. It happens countless other ways through cooking food, cleaning up the community, tutoring a child, or visiting someone in need. I can only imagine how terrible it must be to not serve others either because a person is bound, broken, or sick or just because they choose not to.