The third lesson is that even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it’s still worth mitigating. We may not succeed in educating all the girls in poor countries, or in preventing all women from dying in childbirth, or in saving all the girls who are imprisoned in brothels. But we think of Neth and remember a Hawaiian parable taught to us by Naka Nathaniel, the former Times videographer, himself a Hawaiian:
