It makes a difference to that "One"

Last few days I have been spending a lot of my time taking calls from patient relatives seeking COVID plasma donors and making calls to every prospective donor seeking help with donations. Facilitating their screening and donations, answering queries, making appeals on social media etc.

Someone noticed it and today told me:

Ajay, I notice you have been too much into the COVID plasma thing. Don't waste so much of your time in the COVID plasma. There is no evidence it works and most of the critical patient that it is used for will unfortunately die with or without plasma. Maybe 1 in many may survive. But overall it isn't worth the effort your effort.

I had a big smile, because i could relate to this story that we have used so many time in our awareness sessions at Project Life Force (PLF)- A voluntary non profit that we run in Kolkata.

Here is the story:

An old man was doing his daily walk along the beach one morning, when he spotted a young boy crouched by the water, scooping something up from the sand and throwing it into the sea.

The beach was normally empty at this time of day, and so the old man stopped to watch for a while.

He noticed that the boy kept on shuffling a little further down the beach, then repeating this same action again and again – stopping, scooping, throwing, moving.

“What are you doing there, boy?” the old man asked, walking closer.

“I’m saving these starfish that are stranded” replied the boy, “if they stay on the beach they will dry out and die, so I’m putting them back into the ocean so they can live.”

The old man was silent for a few seconds.

“Young man” he said, “on this stretch of beach alone, there must be more than one hundred stranded starfish. Around the next corner, there must be at least one thousand more. This goes on for miles and miles and miles – I’ve done this walk every day for 10 years, and it’s always the same. There must be millions of stranded starfish! I hate to say it, but you’ll never make a difference.”

The boy replied “well I just made a difference for that one”, and continued with his work.

I pray with strong intent for recovery of all fighting COVID. This is a note for me to look back at this post in future and take pride in that fact that when humanity was in middle of a pandemic i didn't sit back i tried to make a little effort.