The billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes was once asked “how much money is enough?” to which he replied, “just a little bit more.”

I’m sitting on the veranda of the Hoteela Bethlehem in the lakeside town of Ziway, Ethiopia, just about five miles north of the tiny village of Adami Tulu, the site of our school project. Our team of 11 has traveled here to put the finishing touches on the new classrooms that will house about 140 new kindergarten students.

We’ve been spending time with the village children, doing crafts, games, stories and singing in the mornings, and painting the school in the afternoons.

But yesterday, something happened that changed us all in an instant.

Cacey and Mary Beth saw a woman with three children walking along the road behind the school, and asked our driver, Tsegaw, to come over and translate an invitation for the children to join us the following morning.

Aynalem, standing in a threadbare t-shirt on this cold and rainy day, told Cacey and Mary Beth that she wished desperately that her son, 6 years old, could attend the school we had just been involved in building.

Her husband had divorced her, and refused to support her and the children. So now, all four of them lived in a room that would barely fit a double bed, and looked tinier than the clothes closets in many western homes.

Aynalem worked as a day laborer in the fields seven days a week. Her 15 year old daughter Habtam dropped out of school after the seventh grade to either watch her 3 year old sister Tsegeteda and 6 year old brother Meyahel, or to join her mother in the fields if a neighbor was available to watch them.

And yes, she lived just feet from the new school…but she had been working both days of registration and had missed it.

These three children, fatherless and just one stroke of bad luck away from becoming motherless too, were the symbol of why we had traveled to the other side of the world. And we couldn’t help them.

Tsegaw, our driver who was there to translate, kept asking “can you not enroll him?” Cacey and Mary Beth returned to the classrooms in tears.

Our logical minds knew that we couldn’t solve every problem, save every person or bring even a glimmer of hope to every desperately impoverished family in a place like sub-saharan Africa.

But in that moment, as we all talked about what to do and how to respond, we knew the truth.

In our efforts to change the world and solve the global orphan crisis, how much is enough?

Just a little bit more.

So despite the fact that registration had closed, we decided to try to persuade the school administrators to take just one more. A year’s tuition at Adami Tulu School is 360 birr a year (about $21), but the actual cost of teachers, school supplies and meals for each kid is more like 3,000 birr a year ($176). So our team collected that, and the administrators were gracious enough to say yes.

Cacey and Mary Beth were able to visit Aynalem at her little home and tell her that her prayers had been answered. And as they did that, they learned that the little boy’s name translated to the English words “how much?” We looked at each other in amazement, knowing the answer.

We have seen the face of the global orphan crisis. We want to arrest it, reverse it, and for all intents and purposes, end it. And whenever we tire of this task, we need to remember: just a little bit more.

If we all do that, this job will get finished in our lifetimes.