I feel guilty

Today in class we had an hour long presentation about Africa, South America, and India. How can we live with ourselves as human beings? This happens to me everytime I see people who are so improvised yet work so hard. I feel incredibly guilty. I feel like I should be devoting my life towards improving the situation of these people. How can I sit here typing away on a laptop, in a flat that several families would happily live in, getting my expensive college education, throwing food away when it goes bad? I realize that I wouldn't be happy giving everything I earned towards starving people, training them, educating them, etc. I still want to help and I still feel guilty. What makes me feel even more guilty is the thought that in a day or two I won't feel as guilty. In a week I'll be back to living my life exactly how I've always been living it. No cares or worries for anyone besides me. All of this makes me feel like a bad human being.

I've made a small goal for myself. I don't know if I'll ever do it though. Someday, when I have more money and resources and maybe kids of my own... foster a child. Make an offer to an improvised area and bring their kid to the western world and educate them. Send them home for large holidays when they have time off from school. Feed them, educate them, but don't adopt them and don't enslave them. Send them back to where they came from with the skills perhaps to make their village better. Pick a kid who knows that the whole reason they are getting this education is to make 10 other people better off. I'd never want them to lose track of their own culture though, because whatever they did would need that intimate understanding in order to work.

I think that if every family in the US gave a dollar a week, we could probably pay school fees for a HUGE number of children in improvised places. Perhaps guarantee those children one meal a day and school fees. That dollar a week, what does it provide us in happiness? I can buy two bananas at school, a can of soda, or a few stamps. Surely none of those are of such high value that I couldn't donate that to getting children education.

Maybe I should try to shift my studies towards improvised areas of the world. The reason I haven't in the past and I am still hesitant to do so is that I don't like unhappiness and misery! I like to pretend that doesn't exist because it makes me feel bad! And yet all of these things make me feel bad because they make me feel bad! Does anyone else ever feel like they are ignoring the world problem? By buying ecological eggs or milk we're doing our part? Somehow I don't feel like that is enough...