Is is worth it to spend your scientific career helping scientific education in a third..

[MU4ver]

...world country? I am an Indonesian undergraduate student in a decent private university in the USA; I am double majoring in environmental science (conservation biology concentration hopefully) and earth science. At first I study environmental and earth science because I just love the subject, especially on paleoclimate reconstruction and providing scientific facts about climate change. I also have a second interest in evolutionary and thus conservation biology (thanks to Jared Diamond and Dawkins). As my knowledge grows however, sometimes it breaks my heart to see the utter backwardness of science education in my home country (for example they thought it was a good idea to cut down a tropical forest, releasing all the CO2 from the peat bogs, and then plant palm oil trees and sell it as green energy source). For a country with 4th largest population in the world, zero Nobel prize is quite unacceptable. And for some reason, all wealthy people from my country who can afford western education decide to study business and finance instead of science (we have a quite small Indonesian community here in the US and as far as I know like 90% of them study business/finance and a fraction of people study engineering). Finally, just now my friend from Indonesia told me that the head of Biology department in Pelita Harapan University (that's like #1 private university although in Indonesia public university is considered better than privates) doesn't even believe in evolution. I really want to help change something in my home country but I don't think a single person like me can change an entire country (world most populous muslim country with equally insane christians). Sometimes I feel that it is a lost cause and I can just say "screw my home country" and go to antarctica drilling ice core (in Fall'11 hopefully I'll be going there as research assistant) or just do more mainstream scientific work here in the US.