When I was a junior in college, I took a development economics course that explored economics and its complexities in third-world countries (I learned in that class that it could be perceived to be politically incorrect to even use the term “third-world,” so instead in our discussions, we had to use the term “developing” countries to differentiate from “developed” nations like the United States or the United Kingdom). In our very first session, our professor asked us a simple question: Take any developing nation in the world where the great majority of people are struggling and living on $1 USD/day or less. If you could choose one area of concern to tackle first, which would it be and why?

A few areas were given as examples, such as education, defense, health, water supply (in terms of cleanliness and ability to drink). I didn’t hesitate for a second and immediately jumped on education and started to build out a case for it. We got into small groups (our class was only about 20) and were organized by issue, and in the end we fought it out. And as important as education was, as much as we all strongly believed that every child should be entitled to formal schooling and learning how to read, write, do math, and learn about the rest of the world, my team lost. Why? Because you cannot succeed in educating a child if the child is too ill or even dying and cannot attend class.

I realized during this debate how naive I was and how I had taken my own life and life’s privileges for granted. Sure, I’d had a cold or a fever or an infection here and there growing up, but access to clean water, nutritious food, and basic healthcare have never been a problem for me. I never had to worry about issues like bugs eating away at my skin at night to the point that my bones were exposed, or suffering from endless infections due to being tested HIV positive at birth, or constantly vomiting hour after hour due to some fatal illness that no one could diagnose for me because I had no doctor within driving distance. At that point in my life, I’d only traveled to one other country — China, and even there I spent the majority of my time in the major metropolitan area of Shanghai and was never exposed to extreme poverty. I didn’t even know what it was. It wasn’t until I traveled to Vietnam two years later and went out to the countryside in the central part of the country when I really saw poverty stare at me in the face.

The reason I thought about this now is that the last two days, I’ve been stuck at Chris’s parents’ home, bed and couch-ridden with extreme respiratory infection symptoms. Every few hours, I’ve had to spend time kneeling in front of a toilet, vomiting up what felt like endless food and phlegm. I’ve actually been sick for the last almost two weeks, but it wasn’t until earlier this week when I realized the symptoms could be far worse than just a cold. People with a common cold don’t wake up three times during the night to violently cough and vomit for ten to twenty minutes at a time. They also don’t break capillaries under their eyes from coughing so hard that it feels like their faces and eyeballs are going to pop out of their skulls. Every time I got in front of the toilet and had tears running down my face because of the severity of my cough and vomit, I thought about how stupid and naive I was to choose education in that development economics class debate and completely disregard health. Would I, in my current state, be able to attend class and learn about World War II or organic chemistry and actually be able to pay attention and take all this information in? Sure, I’m not dying (at least, I don’t think I am). With my current illness, there’s absolutely no way it could be compared to the ill children in sub-Saharan Africa. But I feel terrible every time I think back to that course and think that I disregarded their basic human needs of health because I subconsciously assumed that would be fine (by choosing education), even if consciously, I knew it was so far from it. Times like this are when I check my privilege and remind myself of all my developed world comforts and how I take them for granted, even with broken capillaries and vomiting through the night.