The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (5 page)

I had a fleeting vision of the shaken student body rising in mutiny—vandalizing their rooms, calling for Captain Buzz’s resignation, and demanding an end to Semester at Sea. Instead the day’s events brought us all closer together. Adversity bonds people more often than it breaks them.

Nobody talked much about the storm in the twenty-four hours that followed. We fell into a state of silent introspection. If someone started crying, another would stop to comfort him. Some students quietly self-organized to repair the library and collect the broken glass. Others wrote in their journals or called home on satellite phones to make sure their parents knew they were safe. The following day, I passed two guys playing a board game and heard the person ahead of me say, “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re playing Battleship? Seriously?!” I laughed harder than I had in weeks. It was such a relief to let the anxiety go.

*  *  *

Days later we docked in Honolulu, since the engines were too damaged to reach our initial destination of South Korea. As soon as my feet touched land, I dropped to my knees and kissed the
hot pavement. My heart leapt at the sight of waving families and beaming hula dancers. I was safe.

But I was also forever altered because I now knew that my life had purpose. Out of catastrophe emerged clarity. When faced with the prospect of death, something deep within me fought back. I was here for a reason. I rubbed my tattoo again, this time in thanks, as the MV
Explorer
bobbed in the distance—battered, but still afloat.

T
hrough a miraculous effort of administrative coordination, the Semester at Sea front office was able to ensure that our semester abroad wasn’t canceled and arranged for us to continue onward while they repaired the MV
Explorer
. As we traveled from one stop to the next, staying in hotels and guesthouses, many of the students collected souvenirs from each country. Some saved shot glasses with the names of cities etched on them in local languages. Others bought a hat or saved a beer bottle. A few took pictures of Beanie Babies in front of famous landmarks. We were college kids, each finding trinkets to document where we’d been and remember something we gained there.

Although I didn’t want junky souvenirs, I did want to collect something I could recall and cherish later. Before I got on the ship, I had decided I would ask one child per country, “If you could have anything in the world, what would you want most?” This would
give me a chance to connect with at least one kid in every country. I would have the kids write down their answer, and when I returned, I would create a map of their responses. I expected to hear “a flat-screen TV,” “an iPod,” or “a fast car.” I thought I’d gather a series of responses that sounded like the things I wanted as a child—the latest toy, a shiny car, or a big new house.

When an adorable girl in Hawaii approached me and asked if we could be friends, I said yes without hesitation. “But first, I have something very important to ask you,” I said. “If you could have anything in the world, what would you want most?”

She put her finger to her chin and glanced knowingly at her mom. “To dance,” she replied with a confident nod.

I laughed. “No, I meant if you could have absolutely anything in the entire world, what would it be?”

She smiled, now fully understanding my question. “To dance!” she replied again with delight.

“Wow, that’s beautiful,” I said with a massive grin. Her answer was disarming in its honesty. I thought back to the happiest moments of my life and realized that many of them involved dancing without any inhibition—at my first Michael Jackson concert, at my dad’s surprise fortieth birthday party, at our annual Homecoming Dance, and the list went on. The purest joys are available to all of us, and they’re unrelated to status, recognition, or material desires. I clearly had a lot to learn from the unsullied perspective of those I would encounter while traveling, so I decided that for the rest of my trip I would spend more time asking questions than trying to provide answers. Listening intensely is a far more valuable skill than speaking immensely.

In Beijing, I asked a girl near the entrance to the Forbidden Temple what she most wanted in the world, and she said, “A book.”

“Really? You can have anything,” I urged.

“A book.”

Her mother explained that the girl loved school, but didn’t have any books of her own. This child’s dream was to have something I took for granted every single day.

In Kowloon, Hong Kong, I asked a young boy what he wanted. His older brother translated my question, then translated the response: “Magic.”

Alongside the Mekong River in Vietnam I asked a shy six-year-old girl what she would want most. She spoke in a quiet voice as she stared at the muddy, brown soil below. “I want my mom to be healthy. She is sick in bed all day, and I just want her to hold my hand when I walk to school.”

Thirty days after we began the trip, I awoke to a blazing red sun rising over the port of Chennai, India. My mind was on getting to Varanasi.

The Ganges River in Varanasi is one of the dirtiest rivers in the world—heavily polluted with industrial and human waste—but is also the most sacred. I’d wanted to walk along its banks ever since I saw that scene in
Baraka
, and the experience with the Wave only heightened my desire. During those long hours when it seemed unclear whether we would survive, I prayed more than I ever had before. The feeling that I had more to do—a purpose—only became more powerful. Now, I just had to find out what exactly it was. I thought I might find some answers at the Ganges, the holiest body of water in Hinduism and one of the most spiritually devout places in the world.

*  *  *

My first night in India, I came down with a terrible fever. By the time we arrived at the airport the next morning, I was covered in a cold sweat and running a 103-degree temperature. I
let everyone pass through the security checkpoint while I gathered my strength, afraid that if others knew how sick I was, they wouldn’t let me go on the trip. With a heavy backpack on my shoulders, I struggled to see straight, and when it was my turn to walk through the metal detector, I looked down to see my feet zigzagging.

The next thing I knew, I was on my back, looking up at Indian security guards shouting. I had fainted. Two guards each grabbed one of my arms and lifted me. Delirious, I thought they were taking me to prison. Instead they removed my backpack, placed it on the X-ray belt, and walked me through the metal detector. On the other side, they strapped the backpack to my shoulders and pointed me to a boarding gate ahead.

When I arrived at the gate, another student came over and shouted, “Where were you? The whole group was looking everywhere for you! And what’s up with your face? You look like a ghost. You’re sweating through your shirt.”

I told him I had just fainted. “Don’t tell anyone,” I pleaded. Nothing was going to stop me from getting to Varanasi. Because I was so sick, I decided I would cleanse myself in the Ganges when we got there. I figured I couldn’t feel any worse, so the holy waters could only help.

In the days that followed, my fever abated. At night we went to the train station outside the city of Agra, where I witnessed something I had never before seen in my life: hordes of barefoot children, covered in dirt from head to toe, begging for money and food. They were so incredibly young to be alone. I saw four-year-olds begging with six-month-olds in their arms. The pain on their faces was devastating.

We were forewarned that giving child beggars money makes them effective workers for the gang lords that put them on the
streets and perpetuates the cycle that keeps them there. Some of us bought the children food to eat, but we still felt helpless and dejected. I didn’t know how to help. I stayed up the entire night thinking about what I’d seen.

The next morning we went to Agra Fort, a stunning red temple within view of the Taj Mahal. But I couldn’t pay attention to the architecture around me. My mind kept returning to thoughts about the children begging on the street, and I decided that I would ask one of them my question. They had absolutely nothing. If they could have anything, what would they want most?

I strayed away from my group and found a young boy with big brown eyes who was previously begging, but now sat alone. As I approached him to talk, a man came over to translate. I explained that I had a question for the boy. I was asking one child per country, if the child could have anything in the world, what would it be? I wanted to know, what would the boy want if he could have any one thing? He thought about it for a few seconds, then responded confidently:

“A pencil.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. He had no family, nothing, yet his request was so basic.

More men came over and started chiming in. They prodded him, “You can have anything. He might give it to you!”

The boy remained constant with his wish: “A pencil.”

I had a No. 2 yellow pencil in my backpack. I pulled it out and handed it to him.

As it passed from my hand to his, his face lit up. He looked at it as if it were a diamond. The men explained that the boy had never been to school, but he had seen other children writing with pencils. It shocked me that he had never once been to school. It then started to settle in that this was the reality for many children across
the world. Could something as small as a pencil, the foundation of an education, unlock a child’s potential?

For me that pencil was a writing utensil, but for him it was a key. It was a symbol. It was a portal to creativity, curiosity, and possibility. Every great inventor, architect, scientist, and mathematician began as a child holding nothing more than a pencil. That single stick of wood and graphite could enable him to explore worlds within that he would never otherwise access.

Up until that point, I had always thought that I was too young to make a difference. I had been told that without the ability to make a large donation to a charity, I couldn’t help change someone’s life. But through the small act of giving one child one pencil, that belief was shattered. I realized that even big waves start with small ripples.
This is my thing,
I thought.
Rather than offering money or nothing at all, I’m going to give kids pencils and pens as I travel.

The next day we headed to Varanasi with the dozens of other students on the five-day tour, and several chaperoning professors in their fifties and sixties. We arrived in Varanasi during Shivratri, the festival that celebrates the Hindu deity Shiva, “the Transformer.” Hundreds of thousands had descended on the city for this holy event. We planned to take a sunset tour first, then a sunrise tour the next morning, during which we would see people burning bodies on the Ganges. Our guide, Vanay, was extremely spiritual, and during the sunset tour he explained that cremation on the banks of the Ganges allowed direct access to nirvana in the afterlife. But riverside cremation was expensive, and most could not afford the full ceremony—the poor often wrapped their dead loved ones in cloth and floated them down the river. We would see all of this the following morning.

The group that had visited the day before had sent us beautiful
pictures from the banks of the river illuminated by glowing candles, but I didn’t want to experience it just behind the lens of a camera. I wanted to submerge myself in it. I wanted to bathe in the water as the locals did.

I asked Vanay, “How dirty is it?”

“Biologically, it is very dirty,” he said. “But if it is holy, and I believe this is the water of G-d, why would G-d hurt me?”

Vanay then reached down, scooped the river water into his hands, and drank a mouthful. Jaws dropped all around the boat. Inside, I was beaming. I had found a kindred spirit.

At dinner that night, I quietly told a few friends that I was going into the Ganges the next morning during our sunrise tour. Word spread quickly, and one of the chaperones approached me. “We will not allow it,” he said. “You will get extremely ill if you go in the water and possibly catch a parasite that will kill you. You absolutely cannot go in.”

I told him I respected his advice, but would make the decision for myself.

The next morning I woke up and got dressed with shorts under my jeans so I could jump into the river at the appropriate moment. I saw the chaperone again, and he reminded me, “If you go in, I will not let you back on the bus.” His wife, also a professor, chimed in, “This is dangerous. If you get sick from the water, which you will, we’re going to leave you behind.”

“I don’t want to be rude, but you are not my parents,” I said forcefully.

Before we boarded the bus, Vanay approached me. “Many people are concerned. I hear you want to go in the water. Why?”

“It’s the holiest body of water on earth,” I replied, feeling a bit like a broken record. “I want to say my prayers and meditations in one of the places that I believe is closest to G-d. I might not
be a Hindu, but any place that others pray to so fervently, in my mind, is sacred.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “This is very good. But don’t just jump in. . . . I will show you where to enter after the tour.”