Kavian Milani

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

Yorktown High School

I sat in the Director for Minority Achievement’s office as she advised a young senior at her desk.
“What’s the point anyway?” asked the senior of immigrant background. “I can’t go to college. I can’t work. There won’t be options for me.”
“I recommend staying in school one year longer. For one, school isn’t free after high school,” counseled the Director. “Also, it might give time for things to change…” A silent pause ensued.

“Tell me about the background of the teachers I’m speaking to,” I asked the Director as we walked down the hall, laughing students running past us.
“They’re all ESL teachers,” she said. “Our ESL students get left out of most extracurricular activities. For one, many of them can’t stay after school. Your program would have to be during their class. We want it to be the thing at this school that is for them.”

“If you had the power to change one thing about your community, that if it changed, it would cause people to live healthier and better lives, what would you change?” I asked the teachers of the meeting the first question I ask students in our program. “After our students brainstorm problems in the places where they live that they would be passionate about changing, our Center provides them resources to create service projects to translate their wishes into reality,” I described.

“This semester, I can teach books on the themes of justice and human rights to go along with your curriculum,” said the English teacher whose class will serve as the pilot for the in-class version of the Health as Right Program this semester.
“And if it empowers the students, we can expand it to the other ESL classes next semester. These students can be the ambassadors,” added the Director. Next week, I will attend the English teacher’s class every day to get a sense of how she teaches and how the students learn. Then we will consult on how to organically integrate our program into her lessons.
“See you next week!” said the English teacher excitedly. We shook hands and parted.

I walked out of the school, a background check application in hand now that I will be a regular presence, pausing to reflect and appreciating my smallness in the face of our charge. To make our youth stronger, by helping them discover in themselves those things which no one in this world can steal; their convictions about the value of human beings, their imagination of a different kind of world, and their sense of possibility that they can create that world through service to humanity. To give them permission to express these treasures folded inside them in layers of uncertainty and fear, to normalize them until they become a culture.

I am not worthy to be the one to shape a young person’s mind. But I am here, so I’ll do my best. Friends on their way to their next classes laugh as I walk through the hallway, full of dreams and a sense of possibility about the way the world can be. My dreams for the future are wrapped up in these young people.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.”

-Yorktown student art in the hallway

#healthasright #youthteams

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

“Next week, the Center for Health and Human Rights will go to one of the schools in our program to give free sports physicals, so the students can enroll in sports,” I told my mom at breakfast this morning.

The International High School at Langley Park in Prince George’s County, MD, is 100% immigrants and refugees.

“That makes sense. That’s a low income area,” commented Mom. She paused at her own comment, then said, “It’s funny how we categorize things, like ‘low income’ and ‘high income.’ You live here, so that must mean you act this way.”

“The coach who is also the vice-principal told me that he always feels anxious during sports practices. Since none of the students have health insurance, if someone gets injured, it is a lot more complicated,” I said. “And yet, the students push themselves just as hard to develop their skills as the youth in any of our other schools. No matter what our circumstances, it is inspiring to see that we all have the same desire to be excellent.”

The dream of CHHR is to help people be excellent. We do it through medicine, and now we’re doing it through a high school program.

“It’s hard to change a way of thinking,” said Mom as she washed her plate in the sink. “First, you have to notice your perspective, then make a shift. The easiest way is to just go with the way you’ve been taught to see without questions,” she said. Is it not the same with everything we wish to change to build a culture of health and human rights?

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

-Vince Lombardi

#healthasright #youthteams

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

When the Center for Health and Human Rights first developed our high school program, which empowers teams of students to create their own service projects to solve health problems they notice in their community, we expanded by outreaching to teachers and administrators to explain our vision. Increasingly, it is students themselves from schools where we have not yet started the program who are arising to initiate it.

Like Aravindan, president of the Biology Club at Southlakes High School, who contacted me this summer to ask if their group could take on the program so they could apply their theoretical knowledge to create practical change in the community.

Also Aundia and Sogand from Virginia Commonwealth University who posted a question to their classmates in their school’s Facebook pages: “What would you change in our community if you had the power?” Their questions have sparked numerous responses from students passionate about problems such as homelessness in their area, whom they will now invite to become a Health as Right team.

We are also beginning to expand to different states through students such as Jackson from Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Florida, who is bringing together a group of friends passionate about service to form a team. The image is the poster they made for Club Rush Week, when the clubs talk with new students about their activities.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

-Anonymous

#healthasright #youthteams

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

The other day, I met with a friend who founded a non-profit to teach local refugees English through language immersion to consult with her about how to improve our high school curriculum for our cohort of ESL students. Our program empowers teams of students to create service projects to address the public health problems they notice in the community, and also to cultivate their power of expression to talk about the kind of world they want to create.

“One thing you should realize is that different backgrounds have different conceptions about things such as government, law, and rights,” she commented as we went through the part of the curriculum where students learn their legal protections according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

She told a story from one of the Syrian wives in her program of a time her husband was pulled over by police. In Syria, it is customary to get out of one’s car and walk to the officer out of respect. When this husband did it in Maryland, an entire squad was called on him. “Perhaps part of your curriculum could just be educating immigrant and refugee students about the social norms and conceptions of law here,” she suggested. It is fraught with tension, this process of diverse peoples learning to live together. Perhaps we can play our part in making this movement of the world and mixing of cultures a little easier, I thought to myself.

“What have you learned from doing this curriculum with students?” she asked. I paused.
“When you ask a question such as, ‘What would you change about the community if you had the power?” I began, “there is usually silence because youth aren’t used to being asked these questions. But once the first person speaks, it becomes an outpouring,” I described. It’s a question that deep down, youth yearn to be asked, but when someone finally does, they don’t expect it. What kind of world do you want to live in? But once they discover their power to express their imagination of the future, they get excited, and fall in love with that power of expression. A person who has imagined the world they want to live in and put it into words has accomplished the first step in creating it. That is the vision of our program, to create a culture of conversation about the future of our communities.

“It reminds me of when we ask our Syrian wives what they want in this country,” said the friend. “When they talk about the present, it is about finding good schools and transportation. When they talk about the future, it is about the hope that their children will help create a better world. Because they suffered from the condition of this world as it is now,” she said.

In the afternoon, I had a phone call with the director of after school activities in Fairfax county middle schools. “Service learning is a big part of what we want for our students,” said the director. “Will you speak at our meeting next month? We would like to help you expand this program to our 27 middle schools.”

Here’s to a new culture of health and human rights.

“There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.”

-Sean O’Faolain, short story writer

#healthasright #youthteams