Somers High Students Receive Global Lesson

Rita J. King

Students at Somers High School were given a crash course in global citizenship last week by a woman who has traveled the world with the mission of forming a global tribe as she seeks a remedy for the many of the agonies she has encountered.

When Amy Eldon's brother, Dan, a war correspondent, was stoned to death while covering the crisis in Somalia in 1993, she entered a dark period of her life and emerged, years later, as a "peace correspondent."

Dan Eldon, the youngest Reuters photographer ever, was only 22 when an angry mob turned on him in Mogadishu in fury after tribal elders were mistakenly killed in a raid. Three other journalists were also killed that day. Dan Eldon's reputation had grown quickly after his photographs prominently appeared in various national publications. He was scheduled to leave Somalia the day he was killed. His replacement, Hos Maina, died with him.

"I realized then that you don't know how much time you have," Amy Eldon, 30, told Somers High School students last Wednesday.

She was 19 when she lost her brother, who recorded many images of her in collage notebooks that chronicled their life together. The same fearless energy that led her to pose next to a cheetah for her brother's lens in childhood has now been transformed into a global perspective that inspires young people to take action for humanitarian causes.

Eldon, 30, who lives in Los Angeles, is the executive director of GlobalTribe, the "first global network of young social entrepreneurs." The daughter of an American mother and British father, she grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. The high school she attended included students from sixty-four different nationalities, and the worldly perspective she brought to Somers had its genesis there.

"This school blew every stereotype out the window," Eldon told the students in Somers.

In 1990, Eldon participated in a safari with friends from six countries organized by her brother after the group raised $17,000 to benefit survivors of the civil war in Mozambique and provide them with wells for clean drinking water. The safari was posthumously immortalized in a powerful book, "The Journey is the Destination," filled with Dan Eldon's photographs and collages depicting the facets of the trip, taken 15 years ago, that altered the path of Amy Eldon's life.

Some Somers students shared their own stories with Eldon, who arrived from a month of traveling to spend the day with students, and Alison Fast, GlobalTribe's outreach coordinator.

"You are capable of so much more than you ever dreamed," Fast told the students.

Kathy Eldon, Amy's mother, is the executive director of Creative Visions, a company inspired by the loss of her son and catalyzed by the energy of her daughter. The mother-daughter pair was featured several years ago on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and when Winfrey and her producers chose the 10 most powerful segments they've ever aired for a recent compilation, Kathy and Amy Eldon's discussion of the perils of war journalism and the death of Dan Eldon was included.

"My brother lived so much in such a short time that the ripple effects are still going around the world," said Amy Eldon, whose film about the death of the journalists, Dying to Tell the Story, started as a project at Boston University and grew into a documentary aired on CNN.

Dan Eldon visited 40 countries, documenting what he found through the lens of his camera. Through his work, Amy Eldon said, she came to understand that war equals hate.

"People die to bring us the news, which is unfortunate, because people don't read the news. He was a war correspondent," she said, "and I'm a peace correspondent. I want to tell stories not about what tears people apart, but what brings them together."

Her "search for positive solutions" has carried Amy Eldon on a safari of her own as she seeks "extraordinary individuals to create a new world community." Her PBS series, GlobalTribe, featured a garbage dump in the Philippines brought to her attention by the actor and activist Martin Sheen. People live off the dump, a stark contrast to the suburban safety of a district like Somers.

Some of the students in the district have already processed the disparity in wealth separating them from others in the world. Earlier this year, the orchestra hosted a PerformaThon to benefit Nicaraguan refugees living in a Costa Rican camp riddled with poverty, violence and malnutrition after district superintendent Dr. Joanne Marien and Somers High School orchestra director Anne Harris volunteered at the camp last summer. Eldon personally delivered school and art supplies collected by Somers students to the refugee camp.

"It's hard for you to know the extent of the impact you've had there," Eldon told the orchestra. Harris, the orchestra director, said the students raised $11,000 to benefit La Carpio.

"Even though the PerformaThon was great fun, they never lost sight of the cause," Harris said. Eldon said the same was true when she and her brother and friends went on safari from Kenya to Mozambique.

"You were smart to make it so fun," Eldon said.

Other Somers students have contributed to society in different ways.

Sarah Burpee has traveled to Appalachia and Nicaragua to build houses for the poor.

"This changed the way I looked at my life," Burpee said. "Before I did this, I was worried mostly about good grades, going to college and getting a god job."

Steve Matson formerly lived in Tokyo and said he helped to build a community for lepers, who are treated as if they must have done something bad in a past life to deserve such a terrible fate and are consequently largely ignored. The tsunami, he said, destroyed one of the colonies.

"You try to do something good and beneficial," he said, "and it gets wiped out."

Eldon drew a parallel to her own experience. Her own humanitarian activism began when a girl in her school needed a heart transplant her family couldn't afford, and Dan Eldon spearheaded an effort to raise the funds.

"We had a huge party in our backyard and raised enough money for her," Amy Eldon said. "For the first time in our lives, we tried to do something."

Still, Eldon said, the girl's life was tragically lost after the transplant.

Somers High School Principal Linda Horisk said the district's effort to teach students about human rights issues is taking shape with each event. A recent visit from human rights activist Kerry Kennedy with a school-wide assembly was a powerful follow-up to photographs and thoughts on La Carpio, and Eldon's visit kept the momentum going.

"As with any initiative," Horisk said, "not everyone will be on board from the start. However, there is a great deal of interest in global issues and current events among our students."

Even before the Kerry Kennedy assembly in February, Horisk said, graduating seniors said they would have liked to learn more about human rights issues. Eldon's visit has affected the students, she said, and they have been asking about ways in which they can put some of their new knowledge into practice.

As Eldon works to shape GlobalTribe to offer young people a forum for their activism and empathy, her mother is watching proudly. The pair has collaborated on book and films as well as Creative Visions (www.creativevisions.org) and GlobalTribe (www.globaltribenet.org). "She inspires people by using the stories of others who have forged pathways to peace," Kathy Eldon said. "This latest project is the synthesis of everything we've worked on together."

originally published in the North County News

Rita J. King lives with her husband, musician and writer WB King, in New York.
She can be reached at dancingink@hotmail.com