In e-mail to vashti

So great 20th birthday present the world gave me, this big Tsunami thing. I feel like half the time I'm walking around on the verge of tears. And I know it's stupid because there are so many people are in refugee camps and have needed desperate help all along, but you can almost imagine someone saying "I feel a huge disturbance in the force", just that many lives lost in one movement of the earth! I don't know, maybe it's a wake-up call or something, and it's really amazing because people in Britain have donated so far I think the total is 75 million pounds... that's more than a pound a person which is really really amazing. I donated my birthday money from my mother, 50 pounds, because to be honest there's not really anything I want to buy with it and instead of it sitting in my bank account it could save so many lives. I think it said something like 50 pounds gives 125 families a week's worth of clean water.

But I just know that in a couple of months time everybody would forget about it, and actually I really am tired of just seeing all these news bulletins about how much the death toll has risen and listen to this tragic tale of this somebody who has lost every single member of their family apart from their grandmother who they found floating on a mattress in sea (not actually a real story... so far as I know).

I do want to do something but I've got to finish my degree first, there is no way my mother would forgive me if I left now, and really I have no idea what I WANT to do but I do want to work for an NGO like Oxfam or maybe even work in Unicef.

My mother thinks I'm going to get a REAL career like my cousins and what my sisters are applying for... maybe she'll let me off because I'm the youngest, I don't know.