Beating the odds

It is beautiful here. Our hotel room is right on the beach and from my balcony I can see the beach and if I turn to the right I can see the tops of beautiful homes and if I look over the other side of my balcony I can see the mountains.

The beach is a real beach. In Texas we had beaches, my dad works on one. BUT not real beaches. The Gulf of Mexico was so dirty, nothing survived the impact of oil spills except for jelly fish and gar. There are rarely any shells. So when we ventured out to the ocean for the first time and David reached into the water and pulled up a perfect shell...it was fascinating. Even more exciting when the hermit crab that lived in it got angry. The children looked at it for a while and then he set it back in the water to scuttle away. We hadn't even gotten two feet into the ocean, the water barely covered our feet. A few steps away I found a patch of live starfish. We spent some time investigating them. It was getting dark, so we decided to come in because there were actually things in the water we could step on and hurt. We saved a few starfish that had been stranded on land by tossing them back into the sea. It made me think of this story that I totally stole from some website. It comes in many forms but I like this one:

One day a man was walking along the seashore. He noticed that during the night many seashells and starfish had washed upon the beach. Thoroughly enjoying the morning sun and cool sea air, the man walked for miles.
As he strolled along, he noticed a small figure dancing in the distance. It made him chuckle to think of someone celebrating life in such an uninhibited way. As he drew closer, however, it became apparent that the figure was not dancing. Instead, she seemed to be repeatedly performing some ritual.
He drew nearer still and noticed that the small figure was a child. She was methodically picking up starfish and tossing them into the surf. He paused for a moment, puzzled, then asked, "Why are you throwing these starfish?"
"It's high tide," she replied, "If I leave them on the beach, the sun will soon dry them and they will die. I am throwing them into the ocean so they can live." The man considered her actions, impressed with the child's thoughtfulness. Then he motioned up and down the miles of the beach. "There must be thousands of starfish along here," he said, "you cannot possibly make a difference."
The young girl stopped. Her face darkened. She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, "You're probably right," she said softly. She looked down at the sand. Then she leaned over, carefully picked up another starfish, pulled back and arched it gently into the sea.
With a tone of gentle defiance, she said, "But I made a difference for that one."

In a few days when the jet lag has settled and the girls get used to their new routine we will go back out to the beach and learn what it means to try to make a difference despite the odds...and there are lots of odds here. More on that later...