"Birth of a Movement"
By Rita J. King

The violence of La Carpio, a Costa Rican camp for Nicaraguan refugees, has triggered a revolution half a world away in a small school district in wealthy Westchester County, New York. Despite steep, time-consuming state and federal mandates, the Somers School District is taking a revolutionary step by voluntarily directing its focus toward empathy and a humanistic perspective of life. Under the groundbreaking leadership of Somers School District Superintendent Dr. Joanne Marien, faculty, staff and students have now taken their first steps toward cultivating a culture of basic human rights. Longtime political activist Kerry Kennedy was the keynote speaker on Thursday at Somers High School for an exercise in compassion and action that spanned most of the day. The ideas discussed were in the spirit of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which focuses more on bolstering the positive aspects of being alive instead of shining a bright light on the endless suffering that accompanies human existence. Kennedy was accompanied by her impeccably well-mannered ten-year-old twin daughters. Her fierce courage is apparent but she still seems to be a person who genuinely enjoys life. “I do this work for the cause of peace and justice,” Kennedy said, “and to build a better world for my children. But I also do it because this is how I derive my sense of fulfillment.”

The Birth of a Movement

This past summer, Marien and orchestra director Anne Harris, lunchtime walking partners, decided to volunteer together at a Nicaraguan refugee camp in Costa Rica, where violence, malnutrition, lack of education, child prostitution and disease only represent the most obvious problems. The poorest in La Carpio sleep in garbage bags. Starvation is remedied with multivitamins. Prostitution pays the bills. The lack of education in La Carpio comes with substantial consequences, Marien noted. When Marien returned, she was quickly faced with the responsibility of composing an opening address for the first day of school. “I couldn’t get La Carpio off my mind,” she said. So she did something that went against her “usual nature,” and decided to focus the speech on La Carpio. The entire district was soon mobilized behind her effort. Even the kindergarteners, who saw select images of life in La Carpio, decided to start donating the proceeds from their daily penny drive.

Girl Scouts collected supplies for the children of La Carpio. Bracelets resembling those sold by champion bicyclist Lance Armstrong to promote cancer awareness were created with the words: La Carpio…Imagine. Thousands of them were sold at a dollar apiece. Last Saturday night, Somers students pulled an all-nighter, dubbed the PerformaTHON, and took turns playing music to raise money and collect bottles of medicine and vitamins for children half a world away whose eyes have haunted them from pictures and whose stories illuminate the fact that life around the world is not nearly as affluent and safe as it is in a Westchester town. Many of the faculty and staff at Somers Central School District welcome the introduction of a human-rights based perspective. Susan Compo, second grade teacher, said the philosophy would “provide a safe forum to discuss events that are meaningful instead of those that are sensational.” “This is about the connections we can make with souls beyond ourselves,” Compo said.

When Marien took the podium Thursday to introduce Kerry Kennedy, she acknowledged the powerful tone of the gathering and said one of the “fundamental reasons for school is to prepare students for thinking and figuring things out…Success is only complete when we defend our basic rights and each other.”

Located in one of the world’s most valuable slices of real estate, Somers is a wealthy community where several students admitted that they are taught, from an early age, to get good grades and do well in school so they can “make lots of money.” Marien conveyed a poignant sentiment about the disparity in global wealth. “The point is not to feel guilty about what you have,” she said, “but to count the blessings of every advantage so that we can give our best to one another. [Somers School District] is well situated to be a light for others.” She commended the students for their various fundraising and humanitarian efforts, underscoring the fact that the spirit of altruism has already permeated the student body. The goal, Marien said, is to “learn how we, as a school community, can best direct our energy beyond ourselves. We are all partners in a global society.” Besides, she said, the orchestra has “never sounded better.” “What Dr. Marien is doing today is the beginning of a movement,” said first grade teacher Nicole Falcon. “It’s her baby and it’s meant to evolve.”

Speak Truth to Power

Kerry Kennedy, mother of three daughters, has been working in human rights since 1981 and has led more than forty human rights delegations to more than thirty countries. In 1987, she established the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, in her late father’s honor, to ensure the protection of rights codified under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Her book, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World, includes interviews with activists from more than 35 countries. “Their stories of courage in the face of torture, abuse, imprisonment and death threats inspire readers to believe in the power of individuals who stand up for what they believe is right, no matter what,” said Amy Eldon, who interviewed Kennedy as part of her Global Tribe series for PBS.

Eldon lost her 22 year-old brother Dan Eldon when she was just nineteen years old. Dan Eldon was the youngest Reuter’s photographer ever, and he was covering the crisis in Somalia in July, 1993. Three other journalists lost their lives that day. An angry mob that turned on Dan Eldon and stoned him to death, an event that is forever embedded in his sister’s memory. At a young age, Amy and Dan Eldon lived in Kenya, and their humanitarian lifestyle was catalyzed by the steadfast work of their father, Mike Eldon, and the energetic passion of their mother, Kathy Eldon, with whom Amy collaborates today. Amy Eldon, a 1997 graduate of Boston University’s College of Communications, has traveled to over 40 countries. While a student she conceived the idea for a documentary, “Dying to Tell the Story,” about journalists who risk their lives to do their jobs.

Amy Eldon also co-produced and co-hosted “Global Trek; In Search of New Lebanon,” a half-hour travel program for CNN International, and co-produced “Children of Peace: A Children's Crusade,” a one-hour documentary for CNN. In January 2003, she presented Global Tribe, a new PBS series focusing on ordinary people trying to find solutions to the challenges they face. GlobalTribeNet, a dynamic new volunteer website, has been launched for young people wishing to "Be the Change" they wish to see in the world around them, Eldon said. When students in Somers were frustrated by the need to ship collected goods to La Carpio, Amy Eldon delivered them in person and experienced the joy of children who were receiving a simple pencil, a necessity most American children take for granted. Kennedy asked students in a packed gym at Somers High School if they knew where the first code of human rights had been written. Nobody guessed, but the answer is Iraq, 3000 BC. “Before World War II,” Kennedy said, “what a country did to its own people was nobody’s business.” After Adolph Hitler, however, the world said, “‘It does matter. We’re all members of a human family.’”

The United States, Kennedy said, still has a long way to go. Treaties to protect women and children have been signed by most countries, but not the United States. “Change doesn’t happen because the government or great armies want it,” Kennedy said, adding that in every major case, military might and the force of multinational corporations has been used to prevent changes sought after by individuals who “harnessed freedom and made it come true.”

Kennedy, who documented cases of abuse by United States Immigration officials against refugees from El Salvador during college, asked the students what challenges they see ahead. Religious freedom, racism and women’s rights were named as concerns. Kennedy added the challenges of bringing peace to the Middle East and Ireland and rebuilding a social contract in countries like Rwanda that have been ransacked by slaughter.

She presented other global atrocities, such as the ten million people who die each year from preventable diseases, 14,000 wives murdered by their husbands in Russia, 700,000 women raped in the United States and the number of American children, one of five girls and one of seven boys, who suffer from sexual assault each year.

“The richest three Americans have a combined wealth that exceeds the gross national product of the forty-three poorest countries in the world,” she said by means of comparison. “Most of the world’s women and children live on less than one dollar a day.”

These bleak facts and figures create the temptation to “give in to futility,” Kennedy said, but she still focuses on the inspirational idea that one person can make a difference. Speak Truth to Power is filled with stories that prove this lofty notion true.

Kennedy said human rights violations against women and girls are particularly prevalent. “Girls are told in a hundred different ways that anger is bad,” she said. Two years ago, when her daughters were preparing to go to their first confession prior to receiving their First Holy Communion, a priest sent home a “little list of sins,” that the girls might consider confessing. “One of the sins was, ‘I got really mad,’” Kennedy recalled. She went to the priest for clarity. “`Getting really mad isn’t a sin,’ I told him.” He asked her if she needed to go to confession. “Well-directed anger derived from justice can be a source of revolutionary change,” Kennedy said.

In conclusion, before encouraging the students to “hold fast to courage and commit,” she read from Langston Hughes’ famous poem, Let America Be America Again, which reads in part: “O, let my land be a land where Liberty…Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath…But opportunity is real, and life is free…Equality is in the air we breathe.”

The Students Speak Out
Netasha Williams, the Somers High School student council president, said she’s the “only black girl in her grade.” She later said this status seemed at first as if it might be difficult, but it has given her the opportunity to shatter stereotypes of “what a black girl is supposed to be.” Williams said Kennedy is one of the “extraordinary few.” “She rejects the common standards of success,” Williams said.

When Eldon interviewed Kennedy, the activist offered her own definition of success. “I tend to be very concrete about it,” Kennedy said. “I think that I am trying to actually make a difference so when somebody gets out of prison that is a success, when a law changes, that is a success. Having a meeting to create change in a law may be part of the process but I don't think that that is a success. I think that we all have keep rolling the boulder up the hill even if it rolls down upon us. Unless you get it over that hump you are not really successful. You have got to keep trying.”

Eldon intends to continue working with the district as they choose a project that students can get excited about, preferably with a local link so they can begin their work in the community. One possibility discussed was violence against women and girls, a focus that also entails helping men and boys shape a new perspective on their own behavior and relates to the atrocities present in La Carpio.

The Human Rights Education Program Director from Amnesty International, Karen Robinson, was also on hand to discuss some of the issues with students in breakout groups after Kennedy’s speech. She pointed out that the candle is the logo of Amnesty International because even a single letter shining light on a particular instance of torture, abuse or imprisonment is sometimes enough to provide psychological relief for a victim. In some cases, the letters sent by Amnesty International can lead to a victim’s liberation, simply because captors or torturers have been made aware that someone else is paying attention.

Global issues overarch, Robinson said, and change results when focused action is applied to “tangible targets.” In a room full of minors, the implications of child labor seemed especially poignant, and some wondered why the United States refuses to sign a treaty forbidding it. Sweatshop labor has been a source of national embarrassment time and again, when corporations are caught exploiting workers to save money.

“Not signing it sends a message to the world,” Robinson said. “Amnesty International challenges multinational corporations, but they still present a problem.”

The students expressed a broad range of concerns and questions. Many felt that they didn’t know what was going on in the world enough to form an opinion or take action. Others took a stand on issues they found personally questionable, such as the school administration’s rule that the student newspaper be subject to approval. Kennedy’s opinion was sought on the matter. For many years, a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial journalism award was given to various student newspapers for “exposing injustice.”

“Free speech is vitally important to a democracy and needs to be as broadly interpreted as possible,” Kennedy said, adding that she comes to a “full stop” when it comes to hate speech.

“Keep fighting with the administration,” she said. “Engage, engage, engage.” When asked later if this kind of talk was rattling, Marien didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. In fact, she said, she’d rather have a debate than see the students become “too complacent.”

After the breakout sessions, student leaders met in the library with district administrators, teachers, Kennedy, Robinson and Eldon. Many of the students expressed a desire to learn more about current events, but some admitted that they don’t watch the news. Kennedy recommended that news be gathered from a variety of sources to avoid any one viewpoint from dominating.

“A lot of kids get their opinions from what they hear around the house,” one student said. “You don’t have to listen to the news to form an opinion.” “It helps if you’re looking for an educated opinion,” Kennedy said. Robinson said the advent of the internet provides students with a valuable news gathering tool. Eldon suggested students also pay attention to foreign sources of news, which lend yet another perspective to global concerns. “We’re prone to live for ourselves in this society, not for other people,” said Emily King, a Somers High School student. Isaac Jaffe, a senior, said any actions people can take toward helping others always comes after “getting good grades” and preparing for college. He’s eager to see the emphasis shift. In a time when state and federal mandates place a heavy burden on districts to make sure students test well, Somers is preparing to incorporate a new philosophy into the fabric of their collective unit. Thursday’s event was the first step. Somers High School Principal Linda Horisk is looking forward to the challenge, she said. Representatives from each of the district’s four schools were on hand to experience Thursday’s historical event and to begin to process what the change will entail at each age level. “This is an amazing journey,” Robinson said, “and an important one.” Already, the students have raised $7,000 to benefit the refugees of La Carpio. Imagine what they will be able to accomplish with their hearts and minds focused on the equanimity of the human condition.

That is their slogan.
Imagine.

originally published in the North County News

Rita J. King lives with her husband, musician and writer WB King, in New York.
She can be reached at dancingink@hotmail.com