Tossing that first pebble

by Beth Dolinar

I was sitting in my car on a side road on Squirrel Hill, having just listened to Luminari founder Hilda Fu talk about our summer camps in an interview with KDKA radio, when the phone rang.

“I heard about what you are doing for young people and it brought tears,” the woman said from the other end of the call.

Her name was Carla, and she had just heard the interview. Mrs. Fu gave an eloquent and heartfelt description of the camps, and spoke of the philosophy of “everyday diplomacy” and understanding that shape her worldview and inspired her to start Luminari.

Carla called to say she was touched by what she’d heard on the radio. She doesn’t have children, but she understands that we’re all in this together, and that a peaceful future rests in the hands of all our young people.

“I think it’s wonderful that something like this is there for our kids,” Carla said.

I hear a lot of comments like Carla’s.

I’m new to Luminari, having joined the team as Administrative Coordinator in late April. In that role, I’m doing some paperwork, some writing, some research and mostly, now, recruiting students for our four summer camps. It’s been a sharp learning curve for me. As a college writing professor and producer of documentaries for WQED-TV, I have spent many years preparing classes, writing and conducting research. The work with Luminari calls on those skills that I already had, but has required me to learn some new ones.  Recruiting and helping to register students for the camps is taxing the memory and detail areas of my brain that had been snoozing since my college days. If it’s true that learning something new will help fend off cognitive decline and dementia, then I should be good to go until I’m 104.

I enjoy talking about Luminari and its camps. I’ve never been a salesperson, but selling the idea and mission of the camps to the school community has been satisfying. Parents want their teens to have experiences that open up their worlds. Our camps do that, and then some.

I’m able to speak with personal experience about the Teen Writer camp. My daughter Grace attended the camp last year. She’s not crazy about writing, and to be honest, I was looking for a way to keep her productive and busy during some of the dog days of summer. My co-worker and producer extraordinaire Gina Catanzarite leads the camp. I knew Grace would have a good week.

Teen Writers working on creative writing exercises.

And she did. She met students from other schools and from other walks of life. Going in, Grace had feared this would be like school English class, but she was wrong. Gina had the students exploring and interacting and conjuring in ways you don’t always get in English class. One day, Gina gave each student a five-dollar bill and took them on a walking tour of Oakland, telling them to spend the money in an interesting way. Grace gave hers to a homeless person and wrote about it.

What 15 year old doesn’t need that kind of experience? Ever since Grace and her brother were toddlers, I’ve tried to instill empathy. I don’t know if that can even be taught. Maybe it will turn out that empathy is a notch on the DNA strand, innate and cemented like eye color or height. But if it’s teachable, then it’s our job as parents and teachers to teach it.

Middle school and high school tend to be closed universes, with each school day beginning and ending with interactions with the same teachers, the same students, the same curricula. Large or small, schools present a whirlpool of experience that reaches only as far as the walls.

Luminari presents students with a new pool in which to swim, with new faces, new teachers, and new ideas. I like the pool metaphor, but it’s Mrs. Fu’s to tell. She created the camps to foster a “ripple effect” among the students. Open one mind and the waves touch many others.

Her goal with Luminari is to encourage young people to put themselves into the shoes of other people, to reach across barriers of race or background or language and find the common ground we share.      

For many high school students, May is prom time. My Grace was excited to be asked to go this year. The day before the prom, the shoes she ordered arrived at the door. They were high and they were pink and let’s just say they weren’t exactly as comfortable as her bedroom slippers. A bit of complaining ensued.

“First-world problem,” I told her. “There are people in Nepal right now who are searching for their next drink of water because an earthquake wiped out their village. Your shoes are a little bit tight.”

Those are hard lessons for kids to learn. We can talk to them every day about being grateful for what they have, about how we all have the same desires and fears; how reaching across our perceived differences will change the people on both sides. Talking about it is one thing. Luminari camps put that into practice.

Luminari Founder Hilda Pang Fu (pictured right)
helps an Ambassador Camp teen write in Chinese.  

During her radio interview, Mrs. Fu talked about the “I Want to be an Ambassador Camp”, which travels to Washington, D.C. for two days of visits to the State Department, the embassies and the memorial and monuments.

“If we had true diplomacy, there wouldn’t be a need for those monuments,” she said. I thought about that for a while. She’s right. Profound and important as they are, the Vietnam Memorial, the WW2 Memorial, and the Korean War memorial wouldn’t have been carved had problems been resolved through diplomacy.

Spaces for the Ambassador camp are filling up. Equally popular is Camp Delicious—five days in the kitchen with UPMC nutritionist Leslie Bonci, who shows the campers that 13 or 17 is never too young to learn to cook a really good meal--and that food is a way to connect with people, too. I’m hoping my work assignment that week takes me to the kitchen, and that one of our students asks me to sample her work. Or his.

Having raised one teenager—my son, a college junior—and still raising my daughter, I know a thing or two about how these young minds work. Teenagers don’t always know what they need or would enjoy until we show them the possibilities. Some kids will gobble all the kale the first time you put it on their plate, and others—probably most—will need some encouragement. In my house the rule has been you have to take a few bites of everything. Often, that’s all it took. Both my kids hated Brussels sprout hash the first time I cooked it, but now they’ll eat it.

Camp Delicious! Teens visit Whole Foods Market. 

It’s all about opening their minds to the possibilities. Try a new food and learn how to cook it yourself. Try a different approach to writing your story. Get to know someone you thought could never be your friend. Find out about him. Walk in his shoes; his probably feel a little tight, too.

I’ve helped to register a young man and his sister for Ambassador camp. Their family came here from Iraq, with a brief stopover in Turkey, to escape the war. I haven’t met them yet, but I am guessing their stories and their worldview will make for interesting discussions at camp. As a chaperone of the D.C. trip, I will have the opportunity to get to know the two of them. I’d like to know what they think of the United States, and Pittsburgh. I hope I’ll get a chance to ask them.

I suspect we’ll find we share some common ground. As Carla told me on the phone, we all have to learn how to get along with each other, make life better for one another.

     

And that’s why Luminari is here.

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Luminari is excited to introduce the newest member of our team, Beth Dolinar. In her new role as Luminari Coordinator, Beth will be sharing her unique skills and a wealth of experience to help us better engage the Pittsburgh community while growing our core programs and strengthening our mission of broadening minds.

Beth brings her talents and experience as a writer, Emmy-award producer, public speaker and deadline driven multi-tasker to our team. She writes a popular column for the Washington "Observer-Reporter." She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics and currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly -- because she likes a really good sentence.