In this entry, I embark to write on a subject matter that has amazed, confused, and astonished me, while the answer has remained elusive as ever. At the risk of sounding cliche, i will try to word the subject matter in question. What is it that inspires a small percentage of us humans to make choices that seem practically illogical in a society so driven towards personal success, and in turn, effecting the lives of otherwise unrelated individuals? Here, I don’t even mean the larger-than-life individuals that have dotted history in what seems like unbelievable achievements. When we think of people like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, we somehow get this notion that there is something in them that far exceeds our understanding or capability. However, there are plenty of people among us that have, or have made an attempt at changing a few people’s lives for the better, people that were otherwise unrelated to them. Its this move, to try to do so, against all intuition, while the majority seem to spend all of their effort in trying to better their lives, and some, like myself, even fail to find the drive to put their own together, that baffles me.
I am not writing this because I recently met someone of that nature, and neither am I going to mention that i found that drive in me to attempt it. Far from it all, the idea came back to me from the most unreliable sources, it was from a movie inspired by true events, as i lazed about on my couch. I did do my homework to make sure that the essence of that story was true. I wanted to list a few of these cases that I have either heard of, read about, and some even personally seen. And as we look at their stories, one thing that strikes out is this idea that they seem to be perfectly ordinary people. Without the intense conviction of Gandhi, the passion of Mother Teresa, nor even the gift of gab to inspire people across all boundaries in the face of the greatest financial (and thus eventually, social) debacle since the second world war, their achievements seems like one we could have completed ourselves. You will find my choices constrained, and am sure you can think of a lot more names that match the criteria, and that’s precisely the point. There are many among us, from all walks of life, some who’ve made a conscious choice, others that have been thrust in the midst and realize an opportunity to make a difference, all with something in common, that the rest of us seem to lack.
Here are a few of those I had in mind (beginning with the one that inspired the movie i was watching a few days back)
Erin Gruwell:
When she started out as an English teacher in a racially divided high school in urban LA in the 90s, she had a class full of students with first hand exposure to gang violence, ones who could at any time be a statistics in the casualty. Furthermore, they had been labeled unteachable, and were below average students. Erin not only showed them to see beyond each others’ skin color, but also inspired them to finish high school (in most cases, a first in their family), and stuck with them all the way through college, taking up a teaching position in the same college. A few of them now work along with her to promote a better educational system for those who face various social challenges. It is said that she used Anne Frank’s diary to inspire them and by the end of the year, the students raised funds and invited Miep Gies to fly in and speak at their school.
It is one thing to ideally say one should not judge by race, but to actually go into a racially charged classroom full of rowdy teenagers, and make them believe it, is an achievement worthy of all the praise she has been getting.
Mahabir Pun:
Mr. Pun mustve faced his fair share of ridicule and shaking heads when he swam upstream by going back not only to Kathmandu, but to his village in remote Nangi, after his masters in the US in ‘97. He began teaching at a local school and dreamt of bringing computers to his school. Years of perseverance, and he has setup computer clusters in several villages and connected them together with a wireless intranet, villages that didn’t have phone services or highway access. The villagers now have their own craigslist, and the category “cattle” has the most entries. The network is connected to an ISP from a city several hours’ walk, providing access to internet. Planned use of the network include e-teaching in several schools, and e-medicine for diagnosis, as these villages severely lack trained professionals in these fields.
Not much more need be said about his accomplishments.
John Wood:
At 35, John was a director of business development in Microsoft. On a treking trip to rural Nepal, he befriends a teacher who invites him to visit his school. John finds out that there are 20 books for 450 students. He starts emailing friends to donate used books, and it has now grown into ….. “Room to Read, an award winning non-profit that over the past eight years has established over 5,630 libraries, donated and published 4.3 million books, built 442 schools, and funded over 6,922 long-term scholarships for girls – impacting the lives of over 1.9 million students worldwide.” He has quit Microsoft since.
Rumor has it that the teacher John met was Mahabir Pun, but i was unable to confirm this.
Rosa Parks:
She needs no introduction, all she had to do was stand up, or rather, sit down, for what she believed to be right. After refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, she was taken to jail. This event sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, leading to the national civil rights movement.
Guru Ama Eleanor Elkins:
I met Ms. Elkins last year at her home in a lovely little town in Connecticut, where she lives in a house surrounded by large trees. The backyard had more trees and shrubs, and little bird houses all over, with birds chirping away on the quaint New England evening. At first glance, this elderly woman could pass for any number of retirees living in the area, born in the US and raised in Scotland, so she had a slight accent when she spoke English, but almost none when she spoke Nepali. She had spent the better part of her life, over twenty five years, in a remote village in Nepal teaching in a missionary school, where she would teach her students not only of the curriculum, but also of the world outside, completely alien to her students. On the first of each month, when school fees were due, she would order students who couldn’t afford to pay it, to show up early, and hand them the money. They would return back to school on time and hand back the fees to school. When students were done with school and had no means of getting to Kathmandu for higher education, she would give them whatever money she could afford and send them off. My father was one of such students.
Her reasons, although slightly bizarre to me, is the most easily explainable. It was religious, a power she considers to be higher than the rest, told her to go about it.
Whatever the reasons, the ends are the same. These individuals denounce conventional ways of going about life, and end up helping others, as the rest of us scurry about in our little lives, if we’re lucky, with a helping hand, from these same people, when we’re in need of one.