dandelions

After a very long day of travel following a wonderful whirlwind fortnight in Philly and Alaska to see my mom and brother, I checked my email last Tuesday and discovered that a favorite professor from the University of Washington had died the previous day.

As I flew on a red-eye from Anchorage to Minneapolis the night before getting this news, I could look north into the Canadian interior and for a few hours I was privileged enough to see a really strong aurora dancing in the night. I now associate this awesome spectacle with the passing of this friend and mentor.

There is a saying I really like, attributed to the mishnaic sage Yehoshua ben Perachia (Nasi of the Sanhedrin and reputedly a teacher of Jesus). It goes,

“Find a mentor. Acquire a friend. And make it a habit to judge every person favorably”.

Ran was a mentor, a friend, and one who lived in the habit of judging every person favorably. An enormous part of my undergraduate experience can be attributed to a ten minute interaction I had with him the first time I met him.

I had just transferred to the UW after fleeing theatre design conservatory in New York. It was my first quarter and I was taking a class on the history of the university as an institution. The TA for that class also happened to be the Honors program advisor and I decided to go to her office hours because i had a question about an assignment. Her office was in the Honors Suite but this is a big and confusing place. I wandered into the suite and wandered into an office that had an open door. Sitting at a desk was a kindly, very professorial looking man and on the table next to him was a copy of the New York Times.

“Well, hello!” he said to me.
“Hi!” said back.
“Have a seat.” So I sat.
We then had a very engaging conversation about the news of the day (Slobodan Milosevic’s trial was just getting underway at the Hague). After ten minutes Ran asked me if I was in for an advising appointment and I told him I was actually looking for Jeanne. He had a big laugh and pointed me towards her office across the suite. Before he did this though he invited me to join the Honors Program at the UW, saying I would be a good fit. This was an unexpected gift that left me speechless.

This gift proved to be the foundation of an undergraduate experience I cherish more than I could ever describe. A truly priceless gift. But Ran was like that. He saw so much potential in everyone and he just exuded kindness and generosity from behind his sagacious, kindly face. The best teachers are those who teach us how to live, and Ran taught by example that this world can use all the kindness it can get. What lesson could be more important?

I had ample opportunity to tell Ran how appreciative I was for the opportunity to join UW Honors, and I hope and believe he knew how much he meant to me. But there is another lesson in this that I am just beginning to appreciate, and one that is really valuable as a Peace Corps Volunteer: small interactions can have enormous outcomes.

I think that the best mentors realize that rarely will they get to fully appreciate or understand the extent to which their efforts make a difference. Peace Corps Volunteers, especially those of us who work in education, sometimes wonder whether our efforts mean anything.

But they do. They must.

A month ago, in preparation for a conference on homelessness being hosted by Dr. Rhodes (founder of the Port Antonio homeless shelter), I had spent all day working with some other volunteers to spruce up the shelter. We had spent all morning grunting and swearing at a massive steel grate that had been taken off a door for painting and simply would not fit in its old place. Moods were not bright and we took a break.

One of the staff members at the shelter has a daughter named Jolene. Jolene is sweet, smart, and sometimes a handful. As the other volunteers and I took a break and drank our glasses of water, someone noticed that Jolene was about to throw a plastic wrapper down the hillside atop which the shelter sits. Someone told her not to do that, and like the precocious little girl she is, she immediately responded with “why?”.

This was a moment to be seized.

So I sat Jolene on my lap and we had a quick lesson in biodegradable and non biodegradable waste. We made a quick list of things that grow, and then a list of things that do not grow. She grasped quickly that things that grow in nature can also fall apart in nature and dissappear and this is why there is so much plastic on the ground but after mango season is over the mango pits disappear.

I had bought some guinep earlier in the day, and Jolene asked me if she could have some. I gave her a handful of guinep and asked her what she would do with the pits when she was done with them. She reasoned that guinep grows and so the guinep seeds would eventually disappear and so it was ok to throw them down the hillside. I told her she was absolutely right and then challenged her to a guinep-seed spitting contest to see who could spit their guinep-seed the farthest and we played this game until the guinep was gone.

I think that when you assume the role of a mentor it is a little like picking up a dandelion puff and blowing the seeds into the wind. I will not be around this island long enough to fully appreciate if this little lesson on ecology has made much of a difference, but I really hope that this little dandelion tells her friends and they tell their friends and so on, down the line.

Likewise, I was one of thousands of dandelion seeds that Ran blew into the wind. And here, almost nine years after meeting him and with the sadness of knowing i will never see him again, I hope I honor his legacy each time I make a friend, mentor or am mentored, or find it in myself to judge someone favorably.