Ben Schumaker
Winter 2008 Commencement Address
Before I get started, I have a favor to ask of everybody in the stands. When I count to three, if you’re feeling proud of someone today, I want you to say their name nice and loud, all right? So only if you’re feeling proud of somebody today, when I count to three, say their name. Ready? One, two, three. (Audience members yell out names)
That was awesome! I did not understand a word of that, but there’s a lot of pride in here - you guys must be having a really good weekend. Exams finished, papers finished, degrees finished. Your degrees are finished! That’s crazy! You’ve got parties to go to. You’ve got people taking you out to eat.
But you know what I envy the most about you guys right now? The fact that you have no way to know what happens next. I mean, you might have a job lined up, you might know exactly where you’re going to live, but there’s no way you can predict all of the people, the events and the opportunities that are going to come crashing into your lives. I think that’s the best.
When I graduated, I really did not have a clue what I was going to do with myself and, to be honest, the only idea I had was to go live by myself in a cabin in the woods. That’s not a joke. I brought the sketch of the cabin I was going to build. I don’t know if you can see it on the big screen, but it was going to be a simple structure – just 20 feet long, 15 feet wide. Nothing fancy. Just a rectangle really. It’s just ridiculous.
My thinking was that if I could buy a couple acres of land and build this simple cabin, then I could live in it for as little as $5,000 a year, which would mean that I would never really have to get a serious job. That sounded just great to me. I would actually write myself notes about my cabin and I want to give you an example. This is something I wrote to myself:
No running water. Just a hand pump outside. You can bathe by heating water on the wood-burning stove and then washing in a corner where you install a drain. You will also need to install a drain in the sink.
This is where I was at when I was graduating. I guess that’s ridiculous. As it turned out, I didn’t build that cabin, because I went down to Guatemala instead. I decided that I wanted to have an adventure, and I looked online for an arrangement in which I could live in Guatemala for free in exchange for whatever work I could provide. I happened to find the website of an orphanage that welcomed volunteers to come and live for free in exchange for helping out with the kids.
So I went down to that orphanage, and while I was there, I met a man from Guatemala who had grown up in an orphanage himself. He told me that he didn’t have any personal belongings from his childhood, he had never seen a photograph of himself as a kid, and he didn’t have parents to help him create a sense of personal identity from his early years.
His advice to me was that I should do whatever I could to help the kids hang on to special keepsakes from their youth to provide them with a sense of heritage and boost their self-esteem. So that hit me pretty deeply because, as an amateur artist, I really like doing portraits of people. I have always found the process of drawing or painting someone’s portrait to be a really powerful experience.
So I came back to Madison and I thought, “What if I could gather pictures of kids living in orphanages and then give those pictures to high school art students who could paint their portraits?” One purpose of that would be to provide the kids with these special gifts, like the Guatemalan man had described. But a second purpose, which was actually even more important to me, would be to provide an opportunity for young Americans to literally come face-to-face with kids living in orphanages around the world and hopefully to develop care for their well-being.
So I started contacting high schools and I contacted some orphanages, and the project got off the ground. I called it The Memory Project. Now at the same time I had just started the masters degree of social work here at UW, and I happened to have a professor who liked the project, who liked the idea. He contacted the (UW) Alumni Association about publishing an article in On Wisconsin magazine. That article just happened to end up on the desk of a woman who works for CBS News.
At that time, CBS was just getting ready for Katie Couric to take over the evening news program and they were looking for a human interest story to end her first broadcast. So The Memory Project became that story. Her first broadcast was watched by people around the country, and that brought a lot of high schools to The Memory Project.
My point in saying this is that here I am running this thing full-time that’s based entirely on a series of chances and coincidences, and it’s something that I never would have predicted. And similarly, I’d be willing to bet that most of the people in the crowd ended up doing something that they never would have predicted either.
Now, I don’t know about anybody else, but I still find myself asking “What am I going to do with my life?” And I guess I’ve started to wonder if that’s a question that a lot of us are always going be asking. But personally, at least I’d like to think that if we’re honest enough with ourselves to know what we’re passionate about, and if we embrace that passion completely, then we won’t have much to regret in the end.
I ‘d like to leave you now with a story – this is a story from Uganda -- that helps to fuel my own passion. My wife and I went to Uganda last year – and let me interrupt myself, because speaking of unpredictable events: marriage. Wow! Let me tell you this -- a few years ago I told my mom, who is here in the stands, that most likely I am going to become a monk and never get married. Three days later, I went on the first date with the woman who became my wife, so -- didn’t see that one coming.
My wife and I went to Uganda and we visited a refugee camp there. The people who live in that camp are all from northern Uganda and they left northern Uganda because of this horrible civil war that had killed many of their family members and destroyed their homes. So now they live in this refugee camp in extreme, total poverty. Many of the women have AIDS, many of their husbands are already dead, so the women provide for their kids by spending their days sitting on piles of rocks with hammers in their hands, and they take rocks that are about this big and they crack them down with the hammers to little tiny pieces of rock about this big. Then they take those pieces of rock to a nearby cement factory where they sell them just for pennies.
Here’s the amazing part. These women, of course, have faced more challenges than most of us can even imagine, but when they heard about how Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, they decided that they wanted to do something to help the victims of that hurricane. So they decided that for two weeks they would continue cracking rocks, just like they do every day, and that at the end of two weeks they would pool together all of their profits and make a donation to the recovery effort in New Orleans. They did that.
After two weeks of cracking rocks, they put all of their money together and the total was $4. They sent their $4 to New Orleans along with letters for the people there, and I want to read one woman’s letter to you. This is from a woman named Margaret:
“I greet all of you, my friends in America. The news of Hurricane Katrina has reached me and I am saddened by the devastation it has caused in your lives. I send you my small gift as a sign of my tears, as a cry for what has happened in your lives. I identify with you because I know what it means to suffer. I am sick with AIDS and I know that anytime I will pass away. Yet I am not afraid, because I know that someone will take care of my children. Even now as I write you this letter, people who do not know me are already supporting my children so they can go to school. I pass on this love that has been shown to me to you as well. The greatest thing in this world that surpasses even any suffering or sickness is love for one another.”
That story fuels my passion because it reminds me that no matter who we are, we can always be more generous, we can always be more courageous, and we can always be more grateful for this life.
Good luck to all of you as you pursue your own passion, have fun on all of your unpredictable adventures, and congratulations. And the last thing -- if any of you need to hide out in a cabin for a while, I bet you won’t be there forever. Thanks very much.
Ben Schumaker, founder of The Memory Project, earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UW-Madison in 2003 and a master of social work degree from the university in 2006. In 2008, he received a Forward Under Forty Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association.