The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (13 page)

“They use this as their school,” Somlath said.

“For which grade?” I asked.

“All grades. This is all they have, so they only teach children from ages ten to twelve. They have been requesting a school for fourteen years here.”

As I shook my head in disbelief, a young boy walked past us. Somlath began chatting with him in the local dialect, then turned back to me. “He is eight years old. The younger children can’t go to school here because they have no classrooms or teachers, so he cannot read or write his own name.”

“Ask him, if he could have anything in the world, what would he want?”

Somlath listened and translated, “He would like to go to school, Mr. AB.”

Sometimes you know something in your head, and other times you know it in your heart. The mind delivers logic and reason, but the heart is where faith resides. In moments of uncertainty, when you must choose between two paths, allowing yourself to be overcome by either the fear of failure or the dimly lit light of possibility, immerse yourself in the life you would be most proud to live.

I had had no idea what would happen when I’d arrived in Laos that month. I hadn’t known whether the MOU ceremony would be successful, whether we would truly break ground on our first school, or if I could share any of it with our supporters back home. But I had faith that it would work out, and that faith gave me the confidence to speak the language of the person I wanted to one day become. The more we speak in the voice of our most aspirational self, the closer we pull our future into our present. That’s what compelled me to put $25 into a bank account, brought Nuth, Nith, and Tamund into my life, and carried me on a broken-down
tuk-tuk across towering mountains into a village that desperately needed a school for its most vulnerable young people.

We stayed in a shabby bamboo hut in Phayong that night, resting on hard mats, listening to dogs bark at the shimmering moon. Since arriving in Laos, I’d slept pretty well, but that night I was wide-awake. I was already envisioning the second Pencils of Promise school.

A
fter nearly a month, the foundation was laid on our first school and my visa was approaching expiration, so I left to explore the surrounding countries for several months before returning to see the school’s completion. They say, “Not all who wander are lost,” and my travels now took on a distinct purpose. I was eager to learn from locals and NGOs in the surrounding areas. I started in a remote part of southern Laos referred to as the Four Thousand Islands. On the island of Don Det, a Frenchman who worked for a health-based organization invited me on an adventure to a remote village one afternoon. He would be accompanying an elderly Lao woman, who was returning to her home after being away for more than forty years.

We spent the following day hiking eight hours across rice fields that few eyes had ever seen. When we arrived, we were greeted at the village with local delicacies, such as duck-blood soup and rice
whiskey, and plenty of Lao dancing, but the journey there was even more memorable. We drank delicious freshwater straight from a river, marveled at the brightest rainbow I’d ever seen, and learned that when one family in a village decides to build a new home, the community as a collective participates in the project. That one conversation triggered the idea for what would become PoP’s Promise Committees, cohorts of four mothers and four fathers that we organized to oversee the development of each school we built.

After a week in the Four Thousand Islands, I met up with a friend and traveled south. We visited the floating village of Brunei (the largest in the world), where we noticed tiny boats filled with young children in matching white uniforms. A mother standing along the dock pointed to one of the vessels and explained, “School bus!” Seeing that, I realized that finding safe transportation is something many parents must consider when deciding whether to send their child to school; this consideration would factor in when PoP later launched scholarship programs. In addition to providing a backpack, uniform, school supplies, and exam fees, we decided to cover the cost of safe transportation as well.

In Bali, I visited David Booth, a brilliant British civil engineer who founded an NGO called the East Bali Poverty Project. He shared a series of documents outlining his entire methodology and approach, and I spent time with his team studying their education, nutrition, and agricultural programs. I was incredibly impressed by David’s ability to train a team of men and women from Indonesia to lead all operations. Many Western organizations never transition leadership into local hands, which in my eyes demonstrated a lack of commitment to long-term sustainability. After spending time with David, I vowed to find my first local staff member when I returned to Laos.

On my last morning in Bali, I awoke with my shirt drenched in a cold sweat. Excruciating pain racked my entire body. Something was very, very wrong. Was it dehydration, dengue fever, or something else? I had no time to find out because I had to fly to Bangkok in three hours to make a connecting flight to Kathmandu, where I would meet my dad, who was flying in for two weeks of hiking in Nepal. Apart from my work in Laos, trekking the Himalayas with my dad was going to be the highlight of my four-month-long trip. We had talked about it for years, and there was no way I could miss it.

Delirious, I took a taxi to the airport, and after arriving in Bangkok, I had to walk through the thermal-image scanner that was set up at customs to detect anyone who had an elevated temperature. I set off the machine right away. Two men from airport security escorted me to a quarantined area where they took my temperature. I had a fever of 103.4 degrees Fahrenheit. They immediately placed a Michael Jackson–style mask over my mouth and told me that I would be placed in the hospital for a week of tests.
I can’t spend the next week in a Thai hospital,
I thought. I had to make my connecting flight to meet my dad.

“I’m fine, just a small headache,” I said. “Nothing is wrong.”

“No, something is wrong,” said a Thai security officer with a stern face.

“I need to leave.”

“No, you need to go to the hospital. Go to the nurse waiting for you in the corner.”

Joel Puac had once instructed me to always walk with a purpose. If you look like you know what you are doing, people will assume the same. I walked straight up to the nurse, looked her in the eyes, and said confidently, “You’re supposed to sign this form so I can leave.” She looked around for secondary approval, but no
one was nearby. I kept my eyes fixed directly on hers, hoping that my poker face wouldn’t give away the biggest bluff I’d ever tried to pull off.

It worked: she signed the form and I quickly slipped out without anyone’s noticing. I bolted through immigration, grabbed my bag, and jetted out of the airport toward the Silver Gold Garden, a cheap hotel nearby, in hopes that a night’s rest would kick-start a recovery. Shivering and with a cold towel on my head, I emailed my dad,
I’ll need to see a doctor as soon as I land, but I’ll see you at the airport in Nepal.

*  *  *

After I arrived in Kathmandu, I was bedridden for several days. Eventually my fever broke, and I managed to do about half the trek, but I felt awful the entire time. Fortunately, my dad tended to me as never before, barely leaving my bedside. I guess those with hard exteriors sometimes have the softest interiors.

After our two weeks together, he headed back to the States, and I met with Agatha Thapa, who in the 1970s founded the organization Seto Gurans, which now delivers early-childhood-education programs in villages across fifty-nine of Nepal’s seventy-five districts. Her programs enable women to use items they can find in their rural villages—fruits, vegetables, string, tire scraps—to create a curriculum for teaching young children. This relationship would be pivotal: a year later Agatha took in our first PoP Fellow, who lived in Nepal for four months observing her holistic education model, which helped lay the foundation for our programs to teach transferable skills within each community where we build a school.

On my last day in Nepal, protests against the government swept across the entire city of Kathmandu. All transportation, banks, and businesses were shut down. Since no taxis were in operation,
I found a Nepali man peddling a bicycle-operated tuk-tuk who agreed to ride forty-five minutes across the city to get me to the airport. After I paid his fee up front, we took off.

As we got closer to the city’s main intersection, I heard loud chants coming closer and closer. The streets were filled with people shouting with rage. When we tried to cross the intersection, hundreds of men carrying sticks suddenly converged on us from all sides. They surrounded the tuk-tuk, screaming angrily, shaking their sticks and clubs in my direction. My heart raced with fear. A scene from the book
Shantaram
, which I’d recently read, in which angry mobs beat and dismember people in seconds, played in my head. The tuk-tuk driver turned to me and with panic in his voice said, “Get out.”

Before I could protest, he said, “You have to get out right now.”

As I stepped down to the ground, I was surrounded on all sides by an enraged crowd. I did the only thing I could think of: I clasped my hands together and repeated the phrase of respect in Nepal and India,
namaste
(meaning, “I bow to you” or “the light in me honors the light in you”), over and over. I tried to explain to anyone who would listen that I was only trying to get to the airport.

As the furious mob surged, the tuk-tuk driver started talking with the ringleader. After they finished, the driver turned and said, “You will walk the rest of the way. Take your bag, they will not let you ride anymore, and leave quickly.”

Without hesitation I threw on my backpack and walked through the crowd.
Walk with a purpose,
I told myself. Feigning confidence, I looked straight ahead as if I knew where I was going and followed wherever my legs would take me. When I finally left the swarming intersection unscathed, I let out a sigh of relief, asked a kind woman for directions, and walked several miles on foot to the airport’s barricaded entrance.

My heart was still pounding, but I felt terrible for not thanking the tuk-tuk driver. His willingness to stand up for a complete stranger had saved me from a potentially fatal beating. He risked his own safety, not for any reward, but because it was the right thing to do.

In any confrontation, most people focus on the perpetrator and the victim. There is an inherent expectation that had one of these two acted differently, the outcomes of a conflict may have been averted. But the greatest opportunity actually exists within the role of the bystander, the person who neither benefits nor gains from the event itself. When a bystander steps up on behalf of a potential victim, just as that tuk-tuk driver did for me that day on the streets of Kathmandu, he or she becomes the very definition of a hero. We are more often bystanders to conflict than we are victims or perpetrators, and with that comes the recognition that we have a moral obligation to defend others, even when the crosshairs of injustice aren’t pointed at us personally.

*  *  *

When I returned to Luang Prabang, as usual I headed to Rattana Guesthouse, but this time I asked to meet with the young woman Lanoy, who changed the bedsheets and greeted the guests. Since meeting David Booth in Bali, I had been thinking about finding a Lao local to coordinate the builds in-country. Lanoy kept coming to mind. She possessed an incredible work ethic and seemed eager to take on more than her role at the guesthouse asked of her.

When I had the chance to sit down with her, she told me about how on weekends she volunteered to bring food to families in the countryside, and that she dreamed of one day helping the children of her country. I shared my vision for Pencils of Promise, where trusted local staff would lead all local operations. I then asked her
to become our first local coordinator, explaining that we didn’t have any money for salaries at the outset, but I would invest in training her.

I promised to coach her on public speaking, sending her first email, managing a team, and most important, commanding the respect of men and women in every room she entered. “I would like this very much,” she responded, “but first you have to ask my mom for permission.”

That night I put on my button-down shirt, tucked it into my jeans, and asked Lanoy’s surrogate mother (the woman who ran the guesthouse and had taken in Lanoy years earlier) for permission to bring her on as our volunteer coordinator. She agreed on a trial basis, but said Lanoy could join me only after she had completed her weekly work at the guesthouse. We were both ecstatic.

Three days later I invited Lanoy to join me on a trip to visit potential sites for future schools and see our nearly completed one in Pha Theung. I asked her to bring a pad and pen so that she could speak with locals and record data on each prospective community. She nodded her head in solemn agreement and met with me early the next morning for breakfast at Joma.