2008 John Phillips Award Recipient
Remarks by Scott Campbell '82
October 14, 2008

Good morning. Principal Tingley, Ms. Reusch, thank you for your very kind words just now. I am deeply honored and would like to express my sincere thanks to the members of the John Phillips Award Committee. Standing here, it seems not that long ago that I was sitting up there in the balcony, where I would certainly prefer to be right about now. Up there, in the back row.

It’s great to be back on campus, seeing the playing fields where I played sports, the Exeter Day School where I volunteered through ESSO, the dish room at Elm Street, where I sweated for 4 years, and seeing faculty, although I should probably tell up front I wasn’t exactly a star student here (My parents used to gently explain to me: C must be for Campbell). On the bright side, I guess I am living proof that a C-plus student can not only make it through Exeter and get into college, but even get invited back to campus to get a prize. So, to all you C-plusers, (or with today’s grade inflation, B-plusers) : hang in there, there is hope.

I would imagine that some of the words just spoken by Ms. Reusch--about Africa, human rights violations, investigations, and working with local activists--might seem about worlds very distant from this assembly hall, if not a bit surreal altogether. But in many ways, they’re not; especially in terms of how we react to the immediate world around us. I see many connections to the work I have done and what many of you are now doing.

To explain what I mean, allow me to tell you a story this morning about a friend of mine, Jay Nash. When Jay was in 1st grade in Massachusetts in the 1950s, there was a boy in his class with crutches and leg braces, his legs having been paralyzed by polio. Polio, as you may well know, has been eradicated in the United States thanks to vaccination campaigns. In the 1950s, when Jay and the boy were in school, anyone could catch the polio virus, and it left many victims paralyzed from the waist down for life. President Franklin Roosevelt, of course, was one of its more famous victims.

Their classroom was on the third floor, and the school custodian had to carry the boy up and down the stairs at the beginning and end of each day as well as for recess. One day, the boy’s braces got ‘stuck’ -- there was no way for the boy to move one of his legs. The custodian had to fix the braces, right then and there, in the classroom. He did it with a hammer.

At the time, Jay found the boy’s situation profoundly unfair. Any of his classmates could have easily suffered the same accident of fate. Why did this one boy have to suffer?

Jay didn’t give polio much more thought until some 15 years later when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, for the first time, he encountered many people crawling on the ground or limping on legs paralyzed by polio. They made his 1st grade classmate look lucky: Very few had braces or crutches. [Start of slides showing African children diabled by polio].

Vaccination came relatively late to Africa, and even now the disease has not yet been totally eradicated on the continent. There are still many young people around living with paralysis caused by polio. No doubt as a result of the impression made on him back in his first grade class in Massachusetts, Jay found it difficult to turn away from young polio victims in need of some form of treatment.

On the bright side, he found, the problem of paralysis from polio is often, at least to some degree, a ‘fixable’ one, with either simple equipment or one-time surgery (or both). Surgery and orthopedic braces often lead to victims being able to walk for the first time, or to a dramatic and permanent improvement in walking.

The slides you are now seeing are a series of before and after shots of young victims of polio, before and after being treated by Jay.

Despite his awareness, for many years in Africa Jay only dabbled in assistance to polio victims, helping a few kids that he happened to encounter here and there in his travels. However, in 1998, when living in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi, he set up a small brace-making workshop in his garage and with the help of a few friends, began making braces. Even with his own facility, however, he didn’t really attempt to handle more than a few cases a month initially.

The next year, things changed dramatically. The political situation in Congo had turned unstable. There was a popular perception that America was on the wrong side of a bloody conflict in Congo. Jay was doing humanitarian work for the US government at the time. One day, as a government employee, Jay visited the local university in Lubumbashi and had the misfortune of being attacked by a violent, anti-American mob. Jay was in the wrong place at the wrong time, to put it mildly. He was wounded. The ordeal lasted some 9 hours, and for most of that time, it looked very much like Jay would not survive. A few students took pity on him, and hid him in a building. From his hiding place, he heard the mob trying to break into the building. Reflecting on his life in what he thought were his final hours, Jay had an epiphany. He realized what was really important to him. He realized that he had felt the most satisfaction in his life from the side work he had done in his spare time with the disabled polio victims.

As he listened to the angry mob outside, what bothered Jay the most was the fact that he still had a dozen kids, victims of polio, on a waiting list to get orthopedic equipment. He hadn’t gotten around to helping them yet. He had other priorities. At that point it seemed too late--those kids would probably spend the rest of their lives crawling on the ground. There was no way for Jay to get a message out to friends to follow through with the kids on his waiting list.

Fortunately, at about 4:00 a.m. Jay escaped with the help of the few students who had taken pity on him, fleeing as the late-night remnants of the angry mob chased behind. Needless to say, one of the first things he did when he got out of the hospital was to make sure that those kids remaining on the waiting list got the equipment that they needed.

From that time on, it became hard for Jay to put people on waiting lists and hard for him to say "no" to kids in need. More than anything else the incident left Jay with a very real sense of "do as much as you possibly can afford to now, wherever you are, since there are no guarantees that you’ll be around tomorrow to do it--and no guarantees that anyone will pick up where you left off."

Jay’s brace-making facility soon grew and began providing more braces and operations for young polio victims. He cashed in his entire retirement savings and rented a house where the kids could stay while they were undergoing therapy. When that’s full, he lets them stay in his apartment. The operation has now grown into a network of workshops and rehabilitation centers all over the Congo.

The organization, now known as StandProud, is run almost entirely by young Congolese. Many are the age of Uppers and Seniors. Almost all of the staff have been previously treated by StandProud. In many cases, young people who couldn’t walk are now the ones making braces or helping other kids with the rehabilitation needed to learn how to walk. Some of them are featured in the slides you’ve just seen.

Why am I telling you this story? In short, because if Jay were here, he would be working with many of you who work with ESSO, or Amnesty International, or big sib - little sib, or other similar organizations on campus or in and around Exeter. He would sign up and act in the community around him. Jay would be in the best buddies program, or providing company to an older person, or assisting at the Exeter Hospital or Hospice, or maybe tutoring someone in French. He would be doing something, something non sibi, in the here and now. And I don’t think he would view the service to community here in Exeter any differently than starting to make a few braces for polio victims in his garage in the Congo. And I don’t think John Phillips, or his present day Award Committee, would either.

Over the past years, I have had the privilege to live in places like the Congo and to support people like Jay. I have been fortunate to see the pride and happiness all over the faces of kids walking for the first time. In the evenings, as the temperature in Congo drops, these kids organize a game of pick-up soccer in the small lot beside Jay’s house. There’s nothing on TV that can match the exhilaration of these kids scoring a goal, kids who never thought they’d walk again. I imagine that many of you working with ESSO and other organizations know what I’m talking about. You have similar stories.

Ms. Reusch’s introduction made reference to serving as a voice for others. I have had the opportunity to hear the stories of victims of human rights violations, in Africa and elsewhere. And I’ve been able to tell these stories, through organizations like Human Rights Watch, to the media and governments around the world. I’ve also been fortunate enough, through the organization Global Rights, to have worked side-by-side with courageous human rights activists from the Congo and elsewhere, working together to respond to local problems.

The people who have impressed me the most along the way, however, whether in a refugee camp or in downtown Exeter, are those who have simply done what they can, wherever they are, in their local communities. Those who act directly: those who take a hammer--right then and there--and fix the braces on a first-grader victim of polio whose braces are stuck. Or Uwe Brandes, who graduated from Exeter in 1984, who puts the environment and real people--in particular those who are marginalized--at the center of his efforts to improve the design of our cities in the United States. There are Exeter faculty, who serve on town commissions to figure out how to protect Exeter’s streams and rivers from pollution due to overdevelopment. Or the ESSO volunteer who didn’t ace the calculus test, because he stayed too long at the hospice.

The contexts of these examples are, of course, very different. Exeter is not the Congo.
But the point is the same: I am inspired by those of you who have taken the time and made the commitment to volunteer locally with ESSO or Amnesty or other similar groups. Your work makes me feel much closer to Exeter today than the Exeter I attended some 25 years ago. I am prouder than ever to be an Exeter grad, largely because of what you are doing, and also because of many of the school’s current directions, including making the environment a priority, the efforts to achieve need-blind admission, and an emphasis on community service.

Local activism doesn’t usually get the attention that it deserves. But that’s where the action is. A few weeks ago, I was in Darfur, Sudan, a place that continues to witness very grave violations of human rights. I met Sudanese who had fled their villages after being attacked by their own government’s military and militia. As they spoke to me, we received more reports of ongoing bombing of more villages some 10 miles away from where we were.

As I listened to them, I regretted not being able to do more locally; my work today, as Africa Coordinator with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is one step removed: I am focused on strengthening the United Nations human rights staff all over Africa. I make sure that the UN is doing its utmost in fulfilling its core function of protecting human rights. My battles are on questions of policy and management and operations, in order to make sure that the UN has the best people in places like Darfur. While I am rarely on the ‘front lines’ these days and often do not have the ability to act locally, the stories of those displaced from their villages in Darfur a few weeks back remind and compel me to do my utmost, where I am, as a manager at headquarters in Geneva, to strengthen our own UN teams, as well as local organizations and governments, to protect human rights.

In the end, let me repeat a simple point: find out what’s important to you. Figure out your role, in the here and now. Our world today is unfortunately full of an increasing number of people in need, some in Congo, some not far from this Academy Building. Investigating mass graves in Africa really may not be your thing; nor may providing assistance to Polio victims. That’s okay. It may be a while before you find yourself in an internally displaced persons camp in Darfur. And I wouldn’t suggest waiting for that.

In the meantime, you may want to try the Exeter Hospital. Or an elementary school student who needs some help with his math. I think when John Phillips had "non sibi" in mind it was also "non sibi now." I think he had in mind the here and now--not next week or next year or once I’ve graduated. I also think he didn’t have in mind, when talking about serving community and humanity, such distant problems as polio in Africa or the displaced in Darfur (although today it is quite easy to help some of those kids shown on the slides through www.StandProud.org, Jay’s organization). He meant things like volunteering with ESSO, and volunteering today, this week.

Perhaps he had in mind the ‘Jays’ out there, and others who put non sibi now into practice, locally; those who live by "do as much as you possibly can afford to now, wherever you are, since there are no guarantees that you’ll be around tomorrow to do it--and no guarantees that anyone will pick up where you left off."

I imagine he had in mind the custodian who just provides a lift for someone who needs to get to their classroom on the third floor.

I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you this morning, and for this award which I dedicate to Jay and all those who have taught me and impressed me by making non sibi now a part of their everyday lives.

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