Remember to count your blessings

(Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Dec. 12, 2007. Everyone has problems and challenges in life. Sometimes it takes a little reminder like the one Jack got here in order to gain a little perspective.)

Okay, I’ll admit it, I was feeling sorry for myself.

An early winter cold had knocked me down, and I was feeling miserable. I was also stressing about the upcoming holidays, the annual Christmas Greetings edition, and a newsroom staff that’s suddenly leaner than it ought to be.

Add to that the weather, slippery roads, and the hectic December calendar — with a corporate annual meeting, the company Christmas party, and Koffee Klatsches in both Dunkirk and Portland — and I was in one of those moods that’s the opposite of Thanksgiving. Nothing seemed a blessing, at the moment, and who had time for blessings anyway with so much else going on.

Then, as sometimes happens, I received an email.

It was from my friend Peter, someone you’ve never met but someone I think you’d enjoy.

Peter’s a tall, lanky, soft-spoken journalist from the American Southwest. He’s lived and worked as a reporter in Arizona and Colorado and other parts in the western U.S.

He’s also worked abroad on press freedom and press development issues.

That’s where our paths crossed.

It was back in 1999, and he had been teaching journalism as a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia.

It wasn’t working out for him, and he was becoming discouraged. The folks in charge of the program recommended he try Moldova instead and gave him my number.

Long story short, he transferred his Fulbright to the State University of Moldova and ended up teaching at the same place where I had done my Fulbright in 1998.

We were able to meet up in Moldova later in ’99 and again in Armenia when he was running a newspaper development project there for USAID in 2001 and 2002.

That’s the last time I saw him, but he’s continued to work on the edges of the world ever since, trying to teach the principles of journalism as best he could in places like Afghanistan and Uganda.

Last weekend’s email found him back in Uganda, and if you ever needed a message that would restore some perspective to the little hassles and inconveniences we face, Peter’s e-mail would do it.

He’d been out of touch for several weeks. Internet access isn’t easy in the heart of Africa. This time, he was writing from a computer at a Catholic radio station in Aura, a town in the West Nile area of Uganda. But it’s not your typical radio station. It’s in a compound guarded by dogs and guns.

In part, he explained, that’s because there’s been an outbreak of the Ebola virus in the neighborhood. Panic is setting in.

Wire reports put the number of deaths from the “flesh-eating virus” at more than 20 in this outbreak.

It is, in a word, grim.

But there’s still work to be done.

While I’m fussing about who’s going to cover the next school board meeting, Peter is recruiting and training a clandestine team of reporters for an international organization he works for. Once assembled and trained, those newly-minted journalists will move across the border to Sudan with the goal of finding out what’s truly going on in that bedeviled country that its government doesn’t want the world to know about.

The e-mail appeared, was read, and I was, in a word, humbled.

None of my problems are real problems.

None of our uncertainties compare to those uncertainties.

None of our risks match those risks.

It was time to rekindle some of that Thanksgiving spirit that was getting lost amid December’s holiday frenzy.