A quote in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s "A Man Without A Country" reminded me of an experience many years ago on a cycling trip from Budapest to Parkany (Sturovo) in Slovakia. It a great ride, about 25 km up the steepest hill in the Pilis Mountains, and 25km down into Esztergom. The beer gets cheaper and cheaper as you get closer to Slovakia. We usually managed 10 pints on the day, but always had to take the train back. The Maria Valeria bridge, destroyed in WWII, was a great place to dangle your legs and have a cold one hanging over the Danube with the Esztergom Basilica in the foreground. There used to be a lovely ferry to take you across, but the Slovaks and Hungarians finally got their act together, with EU money, and rebuilt the bridge in 2001. Until then, there had been a good cheap restaurant right in the middle of the bridge (no traffic to worry about for the previous 50 years).

After reconstruction, the restaurant moved to a boat tied up close to the bridge on the Slovak side. I think it is called Popeye's. Still a great view and cheap good food and beer. Anyway, on one of these trips, several friends declined the invitation because they wanted to watch the funeral of Princess Di on tv (September 6, 1997). She was "a hero, a saint." In fact, when we stopped in pub in Pilisszentkereszt , the locals were also glued to the tv in the pub. When they heard us speaking English, they grabbed Eva and asked her to translate the English broadcast for them. It took us a long time and a few beers later to finally extricate her. What Vonnegut said was, "Saints are people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society." Not to take anything away from Princess Di's important work to rid the world of landmines, and using her position for good, but for her, it was easy. With the leisure time and money of her position, she had the monetary and time flexibility to volunteer, and I think the world has benefited from her contribution. However, that does not make her a saint or hero in my book. Saints and heros in my book are those such as the peace, social justice and environmental activists in Kosova, Palestine, Nigeria, Russia, Albania, China and elsewhere who struggle every day to feed their families yet find the passion and energy to still volunteer to try to make this a better world. They are the single women raising three kids yet running environmental campaigns; the Chinese student standing in front of a line of tanks on their way to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations; the local tribespeople in the Niger Delta fighting to save their environment while getting killed by Shell's private army; the Kosovars working in NGOs when 8 years after the international community stepped in to stop the genocide, they still have to work and study and live with regular power, water, and heating outages; the young girl who with others chained herself across a city street and passed out leaflets about air pollution who lost her arm to a driver who decided he did not want to wait 2 minutes and drove into the chain. For me, these are the heroes, the saints.