Last week I sat down for drinks with some friends from FACE AIDS. Both were their chapter's respective leader. Our conversation came around to the benefits of joining a national organization like FACE AIDS. Both agreed that the most significant benefit was access to a peer community of like-minded individuals. Learning from others' experiences, sharing stories, and celebrating successes are a but few of the most explicit benefits of a strong peer community.
During our conversation it became apparent that the power of stories-- who are you? how did you get here? why are you involved in this work?-- was one of the greatest motivators for these, and I suspect other, students. In the spirit of stories, I will share my own path to global health.
I was born and raised in an Irish-Catholic household in Worcester, Massachusetts. My parents are both academics- my father a dean at Boston College, my mother a philosophy professor/Associate Provost at Assumption College- so I grew up in a house filled with books and ideas. Dinner conversation frequently moved from philosophy to Catholic ethics to the Patriots and came full circle with a little Aristotle. The conversations were never mere rhetoric. Rather, my parents constantly reminded my siblings and me that there were poor, hungry, disenfranchised, and dying people all over the world who shared the same humanity that we did. It was our duty, as their brothers and sisters, to work to improve their lives.
Thus, my moral foundation consisted of a love of ideas and philosophy, the belief that all men, women, and children are created equal and deserve equal treatment, and that it is our collective duty to ameliorate suffering around the world. These ideas were difficult to grapple with as a child, try though I did. One Christmas, I organized my friends to pick branches off of a tree, tie small ribbons about the pieces, and pawn them off on our neighbors as "mistletoe". We raised a whopping $27 which we promptly turned over to our parish priest "to help the poor". We made it into the homily that week, but I'm not sure the money changed the systems which produce and perpetuate poverty.
Throughout high school I engaged in various kinds of service, but became increasingly skeptical about my ability to make a real impact. Although my school preached the power of service, week-long service expeditions during spring break or an annual day of community service seemed trite. These efforts were never sustained; the programs were more directed at student development than actual social impact. I graduated with a more skeptical, but still optimistic view towards the power of young people to make change.
When I arrived at college I knew I wanted to study something that would further open my eyes to the inequalities in the world and would enable me to make a difference. I didn't know what difference I wanted to make, only that I had a gut intuition that there was some drastically wrong about our world. International Relations presented itself as the ideal candidate. Its combination of economics, history, political science, philosophy, and language created a multifaceted approach to learn about the world around me. Once again, however, I soon found myself disenchanted. I hated to read about problems of hunger, poverty, war, famine, disease, rape, and more, but not have a set avenue to take action. In the spring of my freshman year I called my parents and told them I was going to drop out. I felt selfish for sitting on a pristine college campus investing in myself without really giving back to others. I felt that I was shirking the values that made up my constitution. I didn't know what I was going to do or what I really needed, but I was convinced I wasn't going to find it on a college campus.
My parents wisely counselled me to finish my freshman year while looking for ways to get involved on campus. I could regroup during the summertime. Fortunately I took this advice and began sending out emails to several campus groups. One went to a group called FACE AIDS and inquired about an event they had called the Ride Against AIDS. The RAA is a cross-country bike ride to raise funds and awareness for the fight against HIV. I informed the generic email account that while I could not commit to the ride that summer, I would certainly consider it for the summer of 2009.
The next 15 months were a wild ride. A representative from FACE AIDS responded in October, informing me that the 2008 RAA had, regretfully, not attracted any riders, but that, if I were willing to recruit new riders, plan a route, coordinate speaking events, and fundraise at least $5,000 they would support me in the venture. I agreed and began a journey whose impact I could not have fully realized at the time.
My summer on the Ride Against AIDS was transformative. Over 61 days my friend, Dave Evans, and I biked 4,500 miles from San Francisco to Boston. We made friends, ate local dishes, talked on radio shows, sat for interviews with newspapers, broke speed limits, crashed our bikes, got back on, saw more of this beautiful country than I ever knew existed, and raised $19,000 for FACE AIDS. In mid-August we cruised into Boston and so (we thought) concluded our journey. We headed up to a hotel room on the Boston Harbor to get ready for dinner when something simple, yet life changing happened.
Before showering, Dave and I watched the sunset over the city of Boston and across the 4,500 miles we had just traversed. Our friends and family were in town and all of them had the same thing to say: "You must feel terrific! Congratulations. What an amazing accomplishment!" Yet in that moment, as the sun started to sink behind the Prudential Center, I felt that I had accomplished nothing. I felt empty. What in the world did riding my bike have to do with fighting HIV? Wasn't our fundraising just a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things? How could we-- two sophomores in college-- possibly be arrogant enough to think we could make a difference?
I voiced these dark thoughts to Dave and was surprised to learn he felt the exact same way. He felt that the power of our Ride lay not in its completion, but in its expansion. "What if we grew this thing, Austin? What if we had 10, 50, or even a 100 riders raising hundreds of thousands of dollar annually?" he asked. I had had a similar thought. As the sun collapsed beyond the horizon, Dave and I made a pact that we would relentlessly sustain and grow the Ride for the summer of 2010. Only by empowering other students could we make our summer a worthwhile endeavor.
Over the next two years the Ride Against AIDS produced 12 alumni who raised over $100,000 for FACE AIDS. At the beginning of the 2011 Ride, I walked across a stage and officially graduated from college. It struck me that I received my degree just around the corner from where I had placed a call to my parents three years earlier telling them I was going to drop out. Never could I have imagined that during my college years I would find an organization that taught, inspired, and challenged me to take meaningful action on behalf of the world's poor. I felt grateful and hopeful, but most importantly, I felt empowered as a young person to take meaningful action to address some of the world's most pressing problems.
So that's how I came to global health: with a childhood of philosophy and Catholic ethics; through the study of global inequalities with an International Relations major; on two wheels during a cross-country bike ride; and with the belief that real leadership entails empowering others to express their values through action. It has been my privilege to hear the stories of other global health activists, and I look forward to sharing some of them with you in the coming weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment