essays

Story Time

we all have one

All of us have arrived at this moment by traveling a different story. Our narratives have been full of forks, twists and turns, shortcuts and detours, but here we are to intersect with each other in the now. How we got here isn’t just a tale though. It is the very world we live in, inside our head. And as much as we can let others in, they will always see it with a different set of eyes, coming in from another angle. None of our life stories are mundane, for none are alike. Each single one is told for the very first and the very last time.

Robert, Salasaka / Ecuador · 2012

How do you start talking about someone whose every character trait, anecdote, and accomplishment would merit introducing them? Robert lived a lot of lives. He was never afraid to follow his own broken compass that never showed due north. He lived what he loved, and loved what he lived, and he loved a lot of things, and lived them fiercely. Robert who was too smart and restless to finish high school. Navy Robert. Robert the advertising genius. Robert the author. Robert the entrepreneur. Robert who was bankrupt three times but not once intimidated. Robert who drove an RV across the States. Robert who worked at a club and ended up on a Learjet to Vegas, borrowing swim shorts from a celebrity. Robert the father. Arizona Robert who lived in Mexico for 30 years. I met Robert in 2012 during his last life, when he was an 80-year-old philanthropist. He used his small pension fund to support a Montessori-style school in the Ecuadorian Andes, aimed at maintaining the local indigenous heritage, and built a nonprofit organization around it. Robert had arrived to Salasaka in his early seventies with nothing but a small suitcase and the expectation to stay for two weeks, but he never left. His last, arbitrary love was a place and occupation as likely or unlikely as any. Becoming an important member of the community and sharing his house with volunteers from all over the world, Robert inspired hundreds of lives with contagious enthusiasm, praised and unpraised generosity, and the rare combination of being a dreamer and a doer. Robert didn’t do what he didn’t want to do, and went his way undisturbed by the voices around him, unapologetic and unwavering. He would tell me: “If I wake up one morning and don’t want to do this anymore, I’ll do something else.” It was that commitment to himself that made him so great at everything he touched. It was never a statement, let alone a rebellion, against the status quo of well-defined pathways through careers and societal norms. Just somebody living the lives he willed. Robert used to say that he was just getting happier with every day he grew older, and if you were lucky enough to hear him sing his signature tune while cooking oatmeal in the morning – You Fill Up My Senses by John Denver – you knew it was true. Robert the American who is buried in Salasaka but lives on in small particles all over the world.

Corey, Kamhlushwa / South Africa · 2017

Corey is the founder of an extraordinary community enrichment program in rural South Africa. I’ll let him do the talking: “I ended up in South Africa by happenstance. I met someone and they offered to send me here for three months and that became seven years now. I was living in an orphanage and met a kid who was just incredibly motivated and it lit a spark where I said: “this kid is doing everything right but nobody is working with him.” The initial challenge was mostly that I had no idea what I was doing. My background is in business and any time you come into a new industry there is a lot of learning, but I think that was also an advantage. I didn’t come in with all the answers, so there was much listening and we really built the program with the students. The first successes weren’t the huge things happening recently; it was just watching students start to believe in the concept and take ownership in the process. I think at Imagine Scholar everybody is going through the process together – all of the facilitators and students are growing. I have to challenge myself daily and that’s a big credit for the students. They are pushing themselves so hard, they are a reminder of what growth looks like. The progress of the students is very individual. We aren’t just a general curriculum; it really is 70 individual stories. The biggest growth, I would say though, is in taking ownership and agency in your life. It’s watching them say: “Here’s my goals, here’s what I have to do,” and then actually doing it. Imagine Scholar is a student-led program and I know that’s said a lot. But our students set the rules, decide how many classes they have, select the new students and that all works into Imagine Scholar’s long term vision. The biggest single difference is how much the students are invested. You know, this really is their program. We’re seven years in now; in three years our entire staff will be university graduates from the program.“