How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -Anne Frank

Running in the early morning hours before school is treasured time for me. It’s hard to climb out of those warm covers at 5:15, but somewhere inside me I find the discipline. The lure of time with my iPod takes some sting out of the effort, and this morning the random songs playing in the shuffle mode made me smile; and one in particular stirred my soul.  As I listened to Billy Gilman pour out his heart out, I recalled several years ago sitting spellbound in Hendrix Theater as one of our own Lovett students, Jamie H., filled the room with her version of “One Voice”. I remember thinking to myself, “How powerful and moving it is to ‘hear’ a young person’s heart…”

Our 7th grade students will soon embark on a study of Anne Frank and a reading of her diary. It makes me pause. The atrocities of World War II , and the promises made to never again allow genocide “on our watch”, reverberate in my mind. And, it saddens me to think of the an ongoing crisis in Darfur that has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings…a genocide in our lifetime.

What can one voice do? As the legacy of Anne Franks’ words demonstrate, one voice can be heard. And when one voice is added to another the opportunity for change is endless. A colleague of mine, George Mayo, and his 8th grade students, and another teacher, Wendy Drexler and her 3rd grade students, are offering up a platform to collect individual student voices to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur. For 48 hours beginning March 6th, students from around the world are invited to add their voices to the Many Voices for Darfur blog. Lovett students have been invited personally by Mr. Mayo to add their voices, and the Mayo/Drexler classrooms have compiled current information on the Darfur crisis at their Many Voices Wiki.

One Voice+ Once Voice = Many Voices. I hope Lovett students (and faculty) will exercise their voices on the Many Voices project. We don’t have to wait a single moment longer…thanks, George.

Photo:

This image is called Untitled (1) 2004
Bahai, Chad – on the border of Sudan’s Darfur region
photograph by Michal Ronnen Safdie
from the photo exhibit:
Rwanda: After
Darfur: Now