The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(36)

“Discipline is important, but I believe it is crucial that a small child is not punished for something that he or she has not been gently taught is wrong,” Jane said. “I saw a mother beat her two-year-old for spilling a bit of the milk he did not want and making patterns on his tray with his finger. Yet his behavior was merely a demonstration of how children learn about the world around them, the properties of things. He did not deserve the harsh punishment he received. Physical punishment is wrong. Chimpanzee mothers distract their small infants from undesired behavior by tickling or grooming.”

I loved this image of chimpanzee mothers tickling or grooming their children and thought about how I had often tried to change a mood to change a mind when one of my three young children was melting down.

“What can we do about the young people who grow up without support, perhaps in an abusive home?”

As usual, Jane answered with a story.

“I had a letter from a fourteen-year-old the other day who was in a juvenile detention center. She wrote, ‘My life was a mess and I was on drugs, and I came here and I hated it. And then in the library I found a copy of My Life with the Chimpanzees. I never had a supportive mother, but when I read that book, I thought Jane can be my mother.’

“Her mother had never told her she could succeed. But when she read how my mother had supported me, and the difference that had made, she started to realize that she, too, could follow her dreams. I would be her role model—that’s what she meant by saying I could be her mother. She started behaving well, working hard—she turned her life around.”

I thought about this young woman, about the power of books and stories and role models to change a child’s life. And I thought about what Jane had said about how important our environment is and that our human nature is adaptable enough to fit into the world in which we must survive. How we can nurture our children is so very dependent on the larger community in which we live. There can be little doubt that the poverty, addiction, and hopelessness surrounding Robert White Mountain’s son contributed to his dying by suicide at sixteen.

I told Jane about a hope researcher named Chan Hellman who grew up in poverty in rural Oklahoma. His father was a drug dealer and would take Chan along on his deals to reduce the chance of violence. By the time Chan was in seventh grade, his father had moved away and his mother, who’d been hospitalized several times for depression, stopped coming home. Chan was eating only one meal a day—the lunch served at school—and living alone in a house where the electricity had been cut off.

“One night, he was in that dark house feeling such despair and hopelessness that he got his parents’ gun and placed the barrel under his chin. Then he flashed on a memory of his science teacher, who was also his basketball coach, telling him, ‘You are going to be all right, Chan.’ He thought about his teacher’s words and about how this man clearly cared about him and believed in him. It was then he decided that maybe his future could be better and put away the gun.”

“Do you know what happened to Chan?” Jane asked.

“He is now a man in his fifties with a loving wife and family and a successful career as a hope researcher focusing on abused and neglected children. A couple of years ago he met up with his old teacher. He told the teacher how he had saved his, Chan’s, life. The teacher had no recollection of his lifesaving words. Chan says it is a reminder of how much our words matter, even when we don’t know it, and that the real takeaway is that hope is a social gift.”

From talking with Jane and doing my own research, I was starting to see that hope is an innate survival trait that seems to exist in every child’s head and heart; but even so, it needs to be encouraged and cultivated. If it is, hope can take root, even in the grimmest of situations, one of which Jane had witnessed firsthand.

“I want to tell you about a Roots & Shoots group that began in Burundi,” Jane said. “Burundi is just south of Rwanda, and the genocide of the Hutus also happened there. As we already discussed, the Rwandan recovery from genocide is a great source of hope, but it came about because of the international aid that poured in after the visit by President Bill Clinton.”

“I remember the horror of the genocide and the extraordinary efforts in Rwanda to forgive and heal,” I said.

“But as I also mentioned, Burundi got nothing, absolutely nothing. It was more or less ignored by the international community and left to work things out for itself. Not surprisingly, it has not recovered in the same way and there is intermittent unrest and violence. The first Roots & Shoots group there was started by a young Congolese man whose whole family had been massacred and who had escaped over the lake to Kigoma in Tanzania. At the school he went to, there was a Roots & Shoots group; and several years later, when he was visiting Burundi, he decided to start a Roots & Shoots program there. It began with four ex–child soldiers and five women who’d been raped. I remember sitting around the table with them and listening to them talk about what they had endured.

“None of them went into details—instead they seemed withdrawn, but I could see the pain in their eyes. As I have done so often, I tried to imagine being treated like those young women and the countless other women who have experienced unthinkable abuse. Some, of course, never do recover. But despite all they had suffered, these young Burundians wanted to help others recover from their own traumas and show them that there was a way forward. I was amazed by this example of the indomitable human spirit that we find in young people everywhere.”