“Then they realize their own story is alive, and then they realize perhaps it has significance.” They’ve never really met a living author,” said McCann. “Sometimes are surprised that you’re actually alive.

Working with the students is gratifying for the authors as well. The organization has authors and artists visit the schools and lend their creativity to the program. People understand one another by walking inside the language and inside the story of somebody else’s experience.” “We change the world when we walk in one another’s shoes: this idea of radical empathy,” said McCann. Through telling each other’s stories, they were able to see each other with new eyes. “These kids were 20 minutes apart and natural born enemies,” she said. Their next stop was the Middle East, where they paired Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli students. “This was five weeks after the earthquake in Haiti and we found ourselves on the ground, running an exchange between kids in New Orleans and kids in Port-au-Prince,” connecting them through a videoconference, said Consiglio. In the process, she met novelist Colum McCann, who became a strong proponent and later president of Narrative 4.Ī major donor - Jackie Bezos, president of the Bezos Family Foundation - asked if they wanted to make the program international and pair people around the world. The program evolved from Lisa Consiglio, Narrative 4’s executive director, who ran a literary organization in Colorado, including a story-swap program in English classes in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Narrative 4 formed in 2012 by a group of writers and activists who recognized that learning each other’s stories and retelling them in the first person is a powerful way to gain understanding. Narrative 4’s executive director Lisa Consiglio talks about how storytelling and listening can be a remedy in an era of constant noise.

… She can be humiliated on a monthly or weekly basis by these things that happen in her community, but she can turn around and say, we have to hear the stories of the security guards. Lahham told her story at the summit, which Lee Keylock, programs director for Narrative 4, called “very powerful.

“I remember how they reacted … they said: ‘Thank you, enjoy your flight.’” You can’t judge a whole group because of a small part of it,” she said. “I had two choices, either fight this stereotype with hatred and make it worse, or fight it with love and kindness to break those stereotypes and show them who you are as a human simply by saying : ‘Thank you, have a nice day,’ which I chose to do. “I was searched only because of my identity as an Arab,” she thought. She answered their questions, wondering why, even though the body-scanning machine hadn’t made a peep, she was still subjected to the extra screening and questioning. Lahham was heading to an annual summit of Narrative 4, a New York- and Limerick, Ireland-based organization aimed at building empathy in people through storytelling.ĭuring the previous year, her school - Nazareth Baptist School - had twinned with a Jewish-Israeli school in Narrative 4’s program to help foster a better understanding of each other, and now she was flying to the organization’s global summit in Limerick. Where was she going? What program was she participating in, they asked. She was body-searched and all of her belongings unpacked and checked. “What was going to happen? Have I done anything wrong?” She was traveling with no family members, only her teacher. “I was creeped out,” Lahham, an Arab, later admitted. As 16-year-old Malak Lahham was passing through Israel’s international airport, security personnel pulled her aside and told her she would have to answer some questions.

Power to the people program