Numbers: Billions, trillions, ga-zillions. When's a number too big, too little, appropriate, effective? I mean, who gets numbers?

It's like gaggles of 3rd graders accelerating every conversation with their own numerical system:
"My dad has a million!"
"My mom saw a ka-zillion in New Jersey!"
"Well, I'm gonna have a ka billion ga zillion when I grow up!"

What would the grown up version be?
"Before you know it, she'll want a googol (10 followed by 100 zeros) of 'em!"

Even smart adults struggle with really big numbers. Particularly as they relate to money, people and sex. Trillions of dollars, billions of people, oh yeah, and sex - the multiplier.

Read more of Amy's third blog entry for The Huffington Post!

Jeffrey Locke recently joined PAI as a Legislative Policy Associate, where he will help educate policymakers and their staff about the importance of international family planning and reproductive health programs.  In this blog, he talks about why, after two years in Togo, he decided to come to Washington to work on family planning issues.  

After over two years as a community health volunteer for the Peace Corps in Togo, I don’t have a canned, thirty-second response answer to why I wanted to work on issues of international family planning.  I do, however, have a story.

Our car has absolutely no business driving this rocky (small boulders, really) dirt/mud road—loaded down with four passengers, no less. A sagging bridge up ahead taunts us to attempt the crossing. But we make it across in order to reach the Palabana district rural health center, surrounded by fields of corn and pumpkins, with a few tethered goats thrown in for good measure. A mere 45 kilometers from downtown Lusaka, we could be in far off Western Province in this beautiful rural landscape.

We arrive at the center and are led to a circle of benches under the generous shade of the large acacia tree. We’re meeting with assembled village leaders and health workers to discuss the loss of the five-year sexual and reproductive health (SRH) project that ended in 2006.

Thirty minutes outside Arusha on the way to Nairobi and then 3km along a dirt road is the Selian Lutheran Hospital. One of 20 Lutheran hospitals across the country, the Selian facility serves the primarily Maasai population in the surrounding area. This morning the PAI team visited the reproductive health (RH) unit of the hospital and learned of the important role it plays in meeting family planning needs despite the ongoing challenge of securing a consistent supply of contraceptive methods.

Ms. Florah Kyara, a nurse in the RH unit, opened a cabinet and showed us the shelf containing all of the contraceptive supplies in stock, which was less than half full. Selian Hospital offers its clients a range of family planning methods, including condoms, three types of oral contraceptives, injectables, implants, IUDs and male and female sterilization; but only after each new client has received a complete medical examination and counseling about her contraceptive choices.