Of these 120 girls (most of them in high school still), one of them became pregnant, and she was so distressed about this. No one knew she was pregnant. She attempted an abortion and bled to death. When her fellow students found out about this, they decided they wanted to go to the funeral and the family, the mother, is just a mother. They lived about four hours away. The students come from the mountainous areas and they come into town, which is the only place where there are high schools.

So you can't even take a vehicle to drive to these remote villages because the mountains are too steep. So about 30 girls said, I want to take the day off school and go to this. Friends, some of them knew her, some of them didn't, but she was a fellow student. They want to go to the funeral. So we rented a bunch of motorcycles.

You can put a girl on the back of a motorcycle, and they can go about the first two hours. After that, it's too steep. So they had to walk the final two hours. So four hours of transit to be at this funeral and they were in uniform. Their school uniforms. This whole cohort of girls walking up over the ravine into the little hamlet where this mom lived.

I mean, it was like the cavalry arriving, you know; it's completely unexpected. There's no cell phone coverage up in those mountains. So she didn't know this was gonna happen. And these 30 girls walk in singing and you know, they help to prepare and be there for the whole funeral. The mother turned to the staff person, our country director, and, and was weeping and said, my daughter, my daughter had people.

She was so stunned by this outpouring, this unexpected exhibit of compassion -- coming literally over the mountains -- to stand there and be with this grieving mother.

The next tiny life-changing moment (and these are all not things we set out to do at Mercy Beyond Borders. These are like the underlying goodness of the people we work with coming out, right?): this last one is a tiny moment, but it was a completely life changing moment. One of the first things we did in South Sudan was start literacy classes for women also in Haiti, in very remote villages for women, not only who had never been to school, but who had never even seen a school, you know, just very, very remote.

And they wanted to learn numeracy so they wouldn't be cheated in the marketplace. And they wanted to learn the alphabet of their own language. So we hired a first grade teacher. Every afternoon at four in the afternoon to come for an hour with a portable blackboard and chalk, lean it against a tree and a circle of women from the village would come who were interested in learning.

So in Sudan -- as a little bit of background in Sudan, there are many people with leprosy, and people suffering from other diseases, because Sudan was in a 27 year civil war. It had zero healthcare happening in the country. So leprosy is very treatable, very controllable if you get the right medicines, but it just didn't happen in their lifetime.

So you see these groups of lepers that are always at a distance, they never interact with regular, normal people. There was this leper once who was traveling along a path and she saw this women's group. And she didn't dare go near them, but she watched them from afar and she saw they were interacting, they were having fun.

They were talking to the teacher, they were going up and using the chalkboard, and she was intrigued. So she came back the next day and she watched again from afar, and she said, "I was bitterly jealous." She admitted it. She told me later, she said, "You know, I'm angry. I was always an angry woman. I thought of myself as a rotten cabbage."

She had no tips on any of her fingers or feet. Part of her nose was gone. She wasn't beautiful, but she said, "I even became a thief to get food. If I saw a pot of cooked food, rice or something, I would go up and stick my finger in it. Knowing that, 'cause I'm a leper and I had touched the food, they would throw it out so I would get it."

That's how I survived. So she was a very socially isolated, very angry about it; just a terrible life. The isolation. So the third day, she came to watch this group of women who seemed to know one another and belong to a commune life that she had never known. And as she was watching on the third day, one of the women from the group called out to her and said, come on over.

We're finished with class. Come and have a cup of tea with us. Come and have a cup of tea. And this woman told me this was the first time she had ever in her life, been invited in by normal people. And she, in relating this story to me, she said, you know, sister, even if you are nobody here, you are somebody to me. This is why Mercy Beyond Borders exists. This is how the goodness and compassion gets shared by people when you just open a door or give an opportunity. So I mean, from Jit who said, "I'm in, I'm in recession from cancer. I want somebody else to be in recession from extreme poverty. ... To the nurse who helped that little girl cry -- that we can help one another be transparent and feel their feelings and accept them. To the girls who traveled an eight hour round trip to help someone who was feeling tragically alone, that mother to this leper woman who was invited in; even though the women feared leprosy, they took that risk.

In terms of interfaith, I love Sufi poetry, and one of the lines is, "Let yourself be drawn by what you love. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground," and we each have our path for doing that. Thank you.