Pick up the phone. Make the call.

Sometimes I do some digging around to find stories to post, other times the stories come to me. This one was in my inbox this morning:

HIV/AIDS is a global emergency. In developing countries, where effective antiretroviral drug treatments are financially out of reach, it can kill with alarming speed. Around the world, there were 2.1 million deaths from AIDS related complications in 2007. The suffering is compounded by malaria, which causes a child in Africa to die every 30 seconds from a mosquito bite, and tuberculosis, which preys on those already weakened by AIDS.

An emergency this serious requires an all-out response. Since 2004, ours has been PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is saving lives and a vote to re-authorize for another five years it is about to happen in the House of Representatives.

The email was from a wonderful organization called One.org. Through this organization, "we" can stand as "one" to end poverty, hunger, and disease in the world. As Americans we bitch and moan about the price of gas and the mortgage crisis, and we forget how really lucky we are to live where we do. I think we have an obligation to the citizens of the planet who didn't happen to be born into our prosperous circumstances.

Okay, enough preachiness. Just contact your Representative and tell them to re-authorize PEPFAR. You can find out more about the re-authorization of PEPFAR here. PEPFAR works:

In 2004, only 400,000 people were receiving life-saving antiretroviral drug treatment around the world. By September 2007, 1.45 million patients, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, were getting the medicine they needed through PEPFAR-supported programs.