We Americans are not an especially reflective bunch. Here we have the greatest country in the world, a great abundance of riches, an excess of freedom to do what we want when we want. We have full lives with boundless activities, yet we seldom take time to pause and appreciate all that we have.

In Boston, we welcome the big victories and great successes of our football and baseball teams this year. This has been a glorious year, with a Super Bowl win and a World Series victory. We had moments of great exhilaration, yet somehow we remain not satisfied.

For those of us fortunate to be Bostonians, we have the best we could hope for: world class hospitals, good and improving schools, a roadway system made less burdensome by the almost completed Big Dig. And for those things in our lives that are less than perfect, we have great reason for optimism: despite inept leadership in our churches, for example, we can give thanks for the dedication and passion of local ministers - priests, nuns and other church women and men.

Despite shallowness in the executive office in state government, we have hardworking, decent neighbors serving in elective office, advocating for the needs of the community, in the Mayor's office, in the state legislature and in the city council. We have a thriving business community, in the midst of woeful economic decisions in Washington. We have children learning in school, most families employed in decent jobs, and the hope that, just around the corner, things can get even better. We Americans have trouble recognizing just how well off we are, how good life has been to us.

There was a remarkable event last Friday night at the Kennedy Library that helps to underscore how fortunate we are. It was the first annual dinner for the Thomas S. Durant, M.D. Fellowship for Refugee Medicine, established to honor and continue the work of this good man whom we lost to cancer in October, 2001. A lifelong Dorchester kid from St. Mark's, Tom Durant practiced medicine first locally and later around the world. He brought his lifesaving skills as a civilian doctor to Vietnam in 1967, and continued his work of bringing health care to crises throughout the world. For 35 years, wherever there was a human crisis- from war, famine, flood, drought or politics- this Dorchester man responded, traveling to Cambodia, Albania, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Somalia, among other trouble spots.

Massachusetts General Hospital established the Durant Fellowship to train health care nurses and doctors to continue his work, and send them to aid those most in need. Last year, the first Durant Fellow was Dr. Kris Olson, who worked in three refugee camps on the Thailand/Burma border. Currently, registered nurses Grace Deveney and Katherine Fallon are living and working where there is a critical current need, in Darfur, Sudan. Dr. Olson, now a Savin Hill resident, plans to join them for six weeks in January.

Writing of her experience in Sudan, Katherine Fallon said, "It's hard to know where to start in explaining what we are focusing on… our main projects will be to start primary health clinics … and mobile clinics. The 'elders' of one camp told us there were about 600 families. Their huts were made out of sticks and small pieces of plastic bags, or tarp, and they were very tiny." This Durant Fellow says the Sudanese people are "run out of their homes and living in the open, with no food, little clean water and in very close proximity to one another, which leads to disease."

The people in Sudan can give thanks this week, for Dr. Tom Durant's pioneering work and for the legacy which the Durant Fellows continue.

And we can have our turkey dinner, with all the trimmings.

- Ed Forry