Good goin'! Great to realize we aren't responsible for rescuing the world, isn't it?
I was asked recently, on VERY short notice, to do a training in Brazil. Brazil! Now, I would have loved to go, and I even had a coworker who wanted to meet me in Rio for the weekend after, but I would have had to scramble, pay to board my cats (neighbors not back from their winter home yet). The reason for the last-minute ask was that the person from the partner organization that was running this had someone unable to go. This organization does this sort of thing often, and we do try to help them out.
The thing is, I would have needed a visa, and would have had to travel to NYC the very next day to get it. That's sort of where I drew the line. I had things to do the next day and didn't want to spend it traveling back and forth to the embassy to get a visa. So my colleague, who was already going to be in Brazil the following week, agreed to do it. I felt a little bit bad because he's CONSTANTLY on the road already, but he loves the travel. I help him out with his writing assignments, and if he was jammed up I'd go out of my way to help him out, but I felt no particular obligation to kill myself for this partner organization.
Oh, and I did my bit by covering a meeting in Minneapolis that the guy going to Brazil was supposed to do.
It all worked out.