One of my students, a refugee from Romania who settled in Canada, shared this story with me: My first encounter with the topic of quality of life was early in my childhood. I was playing with a group of local children in a small Romanian village when a team of North American missionaries approached us and pulled me aside to ask me about what they assumed to be the miserable, poverty-stricken lives of me and my friends. They looked at us dirty, barefoot children with pity, and my friends and I looked back at them with confusion—we couldn’t understand why these foreigners looked so concerned. We
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