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-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

“Saving the world is a team sport,” said Kevin Krisko as we introduced ourselves. He is from Images for Good, a non-profit that uses photography to tell important stories, and one of our photographers for today. And the others who sat in the packed lobby of our clinic were the student leaders from the various Health as Right clubs we have started this year. Today was the pizza party to celebrate launching the Program in 9 schools.

The student leaders also came to pilot test the curriculum that accompanies the Health as Right Program. The curriculum has no teacher. It is a work book of discussion prompts and open-ended questions, designed to teach the students how to have conversations about health and human rights.

“What are human rights?” one of the students read the first question.
“I think that there are a lot of things that make people different, like religion, race, sex, or class,” said Tarlan from Marshall High School. “But underneath, we are all human and have the same needs. I think human rights are the things that everyone deserves, once you take away our differences,” she said.

In each section, the student leaders read Articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first document that tried to codify these universal needs that everyone deserves.

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” one of the students read Article 1 of the Declaration, which covers the subject of dignity.

“Describe a time when you saw people treat each other ‘in a spirit of brotherhood,'” they read the question that followed. There was a thoughtful pause in the room.
“I was in New York photographing two homeless people once,” started Tenzin, one of the student photographers from Images for Good. “One of them went to the other and gave her a few dollars to buy food, even though she had nothing herself,” he said.

“Did you all hear on the news about the Muslim girl beaten to death this past month?” asked Clark from Marshall High School. Nabra Hassanen, a 17 year old high schooler who was on her way to meet her friends for suhoor, the morning meal before the fast. “Her family made a GoFundMe to raise funds for her funeral. When I saw it, it had raised over $60,000 in just a few days. It wasn’t just from people in this community, but people from all over the country,” she described. Kevin pointed out that Hassanen was a student from South Lakes High School, where we recently started the newest of our Health as Right Clubs. Sitting next to me was Aravindan, representing that school.
“See the pain and hope together in one building. Which one will win? That is up to people like you,” said Kevin to the room of youth.

“I once met a homeless man selling roses, but he didn’t want to sell one to me. He just wanted to talk,” chimed in Aundia in her nurse scrubs, student at VCU and one of our clinical interns. “At the end, he told me that he had 420 pennies that he didn’t know what to do with, so he wanted to know if I wanted them. All I could do was cry because this man had nothing, and it was still so easy for him to offer something to me,” she said. It brought smiles to the room.

There was an electricity in the room, the kind when people have discovered their own power to put words to their deeper ideals. A beautiful conversation. “When you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it describes a culture that doesn’t exist,” I said to the leaders. A culture that is just and fair, that gives expression to our highest ideals and aspirations as human beings. “Then it is your responsibility to create it. But what should something that no one has ever seen look like? Perhaps the first step of creating a new world is simply learning how to talk about the kind of world that we want to create,” I said to the smiles of the leaders. This is why the curriculum has no teacher. It designed not to give an answer, but to cultivate power of expression because it is each of us who will stand up to dream of such a world who are the answer.

The friends planned some activities to do together during the summer, including a hike/trash pick up of a nature trail and volunteering together at soup kitchens. In the Fall, the teams will return to their own school projects, ranging from empowering foster youth to finish high school, to creating more resources for homeless students, to making female hygiene protection more accessible to students who can’t afford it; but with a new identity as a network of friends working for change. Today, we create a culture of beautiful conversations. Tomorrow, we create a beautiful reality.

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves.”

-Mahatma Ghandi

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