By: Billy Shore, Founder and Executive Director of Share Our Strength

The six month anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, marked by renewed media coverage over the past few weeks, underscored how even the most riveting catastrophes eventually fade from our consciousness. I went to Port au Prince two weeks after the quake and again two months later. I witnessed the outpouring of generosity from around the world. With more than a million Haitians in desperate tarp and tent camps the need remains enormous. But now most of the volunteer aid workers are gone. Except during occasions like the six month anniversary, so are most reporters.

The burden of infectious diseases on the poorest people in the world is every bit as crushing as the concrete rubble that buried so many in Port au Prince. But it never commands anywhere near the same attention. And even sustaining what little visibility it gets is an enormous on-going challenge.

Unlike in Haiti, the 3000 African kids who die every day from malaria die quietly and invisibly. That’s because they die routinely, year in and year out, in numbers too large to fathom. They die in the pages of medical journals, not in our living rooms on high definition TV. In reality there is nothing quiet about their deaths at all. They are painful, protracted, often horrendous. Perhaps worst of all, they are preventable. New medicines, bed net distribution campaigns, and vaccines under development offer great promise but need more awareness and support.

This tension between the immediate and the long-term, between the personal and the abstract exists in every effort to create meaningful change. It is human nature to be deeply moved by the drama in front of us, rather than what might be imagined for another time and place. As with the model trains of our youth, only engines of a certain scale fit our mental tracks. They are very narrow gauge.

The consequence, while explainable perhaps even understandable, is a spectacular failure of imagination. When we focus on the one rather than the many, on the symptom rather than cause, on what oneself can accomplish rather than on what needs to be accomplished by the broader community, we neglect our greatest opportunities to do the greatest good.

A few years ago Ophelia Dahl, co-founder of Partners in Health, and commencement speaker at Wellesley College made exactly this point, telling the women in the class of 2006 about the ingredient essential to fighting for whatever may be their cause:

“Linking our own lives and fates with those we can’t see will, I believe, be the key to a decent and shared future…. Imagination will allow you to make the link between the near of your lives with the distant others and will lead us to realize the plethora of connections between us and the rest of the world, between our lives and that of a Haitian peasant, between us and that of a homeless drug addict, between us and those living without access to clean water or vaccinations or education and this will surely lead to ways in which you can influence others and perhaps improve the world along the way.”

Since returning from Haiti I’ve been determined, as many have, to try to make a difference there in the limited ways possible from here: tracking down needed supplies, working to find and connect resources, and engaging others to help. The trip did not fail to reignite and refuel commitment, as I knew it would.

But ironically, for me at least, having witnessed the suffering in Haiti makes it more important to look beyond Haiti, not through it or past it, but beyond it, to find and fulfill one’s purpose. Anything less would feel like some tragic Greek myth in which we’d been warned that gazing too deeply into the eyes of Cite de Soleil’s children surging toward the back of the emergency food truck could permanently constrict our vision.

Compassion is both blessing and balm. But unless hitched to the power of imagination it can leave us one step behind the next tragedy, and the next, always a day late and dollar short. We’ll likely end up doing a lot of good, but not nearly good enough.

Moral imagination is supposed to be what differentiates us from the other species. If we hope to truly change the world rather than just the bits and pieces of it that drift in front of us, we must reach inside, not out, must shape our own evolution, with faith that the greatest value we can deliver may lie not in what we know but in what we seek to know.

Billy Shore is the Founder and Executive Director of Share Our Strength, Chair of Community Wealth Ventures, and author of The Cathedral Within. He also maintains his own blog, “Bearing Witness“.