Nancy Soderberg addressed the UWC students directly, encouraging them to dream big and make those dream come true. “We are going to hear extraordinary stories from ordinary people about how to galvanize action. And I hope all the graduates today will take this to heart. You may think that you’re ordinary but you can do extraordinary things,” noted Soderberg.
Marguerite Barankitse, 2016 Aurora Prize Laureate and Founder of Maison Shalom and REMA hospital in Burundi, nearly brought the audience to tears with a very emotional story of the atrocities she had to face. “I never understood why there had been massacres. I lost 60 members of my family, but I don’t want to avenge them. Hutu didn’t understand me, Tutsi didn’t understand me either,” lamented Maggy.
“I decided to create a new generation. I have seen that even my own family and my own friends can kill people in front of me without shame, and I decided that I must stand up to that,” she added.
President & CEO of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Alice M. Greenwald reflected upon the emotional deafness and lack of empathy in the modern world and emphasized that the biggest problems the society is facing concern all of us. “Terrorism doesn’t happen to someone else. It happens to us. It is a fact of life that is now commonly shared - it could be us,” she said.
“When you realize that something could happen to you, it is the beginning of empathy. And there is an absence of that,” Greenwald pointed out.
Liberian peace activist and member of the Aurora Prize Selection Committee, Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee reminded the audience of the dangers of overthinking. “I consider myself a constructive interferer. You see something, you jump in headfirst. I’ve never seen a place in the world where all of those who have made history have overly analyzed their role. They are people who just saw the need and jumped in,” said Gbowee.
She also mentioned the power of negative emotions and was quite straightforward about her own motivation. “Most of these people are driven by anger. I am a very angry African woman. You hear about the mad black woman, I am the African version of that,” she joked.