Affecting world events

Not many people get an opportunity in their life to affect world events. I'm not talking about the "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Andy Worhal type of affect, but real and tangible things that will affect the world for years to come. Recently I've had two events in my life that have the possibility of having that long lasting affect I'm talking about. A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to transport an investigative team to a refugee camp in northern Africa. They here there to see first hand the effects of a long period of strife in the region and how it's affecting the population. The people in the area used to be mostly agricultural based but recently a guerrilla war has forced the people to concentrate around semi-secure camps and have stopped farming. Basically they have stopped producing for themselves and become totally reliant on government and foreign aide. They're economy has taken a downward spiral from total self sufficiency to total dependency. The team I took in was there to see first hand the effects of the war and hopefully a means to reverse the process. The teams approach to the situation was fairly unique in that it was not singularly focused but in fact took into consideration three basic human needs; defense, self sufficiency, and a feeling of community. One of the head guys referred to it as the 3D approach but other than defense I can't remember what the other two Ds where. Defense is pretty straight forward, but the other two where more difficult for me to comprehend. In a nut shell the where trying to build self sufficiency by providing a defense thus encouraging the families to go back out to the farms and out of the refugee camps. Also, the team was trying to get the government to allow us to go in to do more civil engineering project, road, bridges, rail, that kind of stuff. The feeling here was that if the people saw that the rest of the world felt strong enough to come in to do these types of things to improve their quality of life they would feel more like a part of the global community. The total goal of this project was to encourage people to want to be part of the global economy and not part of the terrorist network that seeks to undermine the free world. I'm not sure how this will all turn out but I know it's a work in progress and hopefully we'll all benefit from it. Secondly, recently I was on a crew that took the President of Iraq to a meeting with our President. I have no idea what they talked about but I'm sure it wasn't a social call. Iraq and the whole middle east is so much in turmoil these days, hopefully the meeting enabled a quicker end to some of the conflict over here. Any time there is conflict it destabilizes the entire region. As I've said before conflict is a necessary thing for humans, but in order for us to become better we also need to resolve our conflicts. Hopefully this meeting resolved something so this war/occupation can end sooner rather than later. Everyday someone out there is doing something that affects the world as a whole. Most of the time it's something small such as transporting a VIP. While these things on themselves are nothing, the end results could be everything. We all do this everyday, it could be the bank teller making a transaction for a global relief organization, a taxi driver taking an important underling to a back room meeting, or a world leader making nice with another leader; all of us do our part to affect everything else.