Willy Oppenheim
March 17, 2009
Application for General R.H. Dunlap Prize
What I want happens not when the deer freezes in the shade and looks at you and you hold very still and
meet her gaze but in the moment after when she flicks her ears & starts to feed again.
-Robert Hass
A few weeks before arriving at Bowdoin College for my first-year orientation, I
went fishing with my dad at one of the classic streams of my childhood summers in the
mountains of western Maine. He knew that I was uncertain about the looming specter of
my college career, and somehow or other he broached the topic. In recent conversations
around the family dinner table, my ambivalence about the value of higher education had
yielded exasperation from my parents, and this reaction had only heightened my own
hostility towards the embedded assumption that any privileged eighteen-year-old like
myself should attend college. Yet beside the Magalloway River, this hostility melted
away, and I confronted my anxiety with honesty. I was sitting on a rock in the morning
sun and began to weep. For what seemed like the first time, I found words for my
burden: “I feel like going to college would betray everything I hold to be true.”
Now, almost four years later, I find myself entering the final weeks of my college
career. In a certain sense, the concerns that weighed on me before my enrollment now
seem naïve and immature. At the same time, however, they still resonate: in a wonderful
paradox, the same factors that almost prevented me from attending college have become
the unfaltering source of my passion for being here. Considered in isolation from each
other, these factors offer kaleidoscopic glimpses of my discomfort with privilege, my
desire to engage with the world, and my suspicion towards all that is taken-for-granted.
Yet together, these threads weave a much larger picture: they capture the fire that sustains
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me, the fire into which I offer all my efforts and ask nothing in return, the fire that drives
me without hesitation into a life of service.
Despondent beside a trout stream in Maine, I once felt that four years of college
would betray this fire. Today, I realize that I underestimated its expansive resilience: no
experience or decision in and of itself could snuff out the fundamental urge that drives
me to submit myself to the duties demanded by my membership within a greater whole.
This submission entails more than a sense of obligation towards country and community,
more than a deep-rooted concern for the well-being of others, and more than a
commitment to the achievement of finite goals. Rather, my submission—my service—
begins and ends on the ontological level; it is first and foremost a matter of
consciousness, of how I understand my place in the universe. This nuance was beyond
my understanding before I came to Bowdoin, and thus I felt that the fire within me
needed to be channeled towards some kind of “action”—a hypothetical end that I
constructed in opposition to what seemed like the “passive” pursuits of academia. Now,
that binary has collapsed, and the open space that emerges in its absence has enabled me
to bring to my academic pursuits the same fire that I have brought to my more “typical”
service activities as a volunteer at the Tedford Shelter, the Big Brothers Big Sisters
Mentoring Program, and in a number of classrooms in India, Peru, Argentina, and Tibet.
I am no longer able to identify some aspects of my life as “service,” and others as
something else. It is all one fire, one submission, one offering, and I ask no credit or
reward or end. It hurts sometimes, and it makes it hard to write things like this, but I
know no other way.
Beginning well before high school, I was plagued by the notion that I had done
nothing to deserve my own privilege. Already resistant to the gentrified atmosphere of
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my elite Connecticut boarding school, I imagined higher education to be a selfcongratulatory intellectual charade unfolding in ivory-tower isolation from the “real”
world. I applied to Bowdoin only to appease my parents before taking a year “on” to
volunteer in north India and then submit myself to a winter of asceticism while living in a
tent in Colorado. Yet it was during this winter, still reeling from my recent exposure to
poverty and desperation on a scale that does not and could not exist in America, that I
took the first steps towards a project that has enabled me to redefine the value of learning
and the meaning of service in my life. At a small coffee shop that offered free computer
access, I began working to connect my communities in the United States with the
community I had served in India. I had already begun to abhor the kind of paternalistic,
unidirectional “charity” work that characterizes most international service, and thus
envisioned building relationships that would be beneficial and empowering for all parties
involved. Today, over four years later, these efforts have become the Omprakash
Foundation, a network of over fifty grassroots health and education projects that span
more than twenty countries and are linked to a variety of schools and communities within
the United States.
Joined by a handful of friends, I’ve worked tirelessly over the past several years
to develop Omprakash into a resource that provides crucial services to social actors as
diverse as teachers in India, students in Maine, and health workers in Cambodia. The
basic mission of Omprakash is to provide the world with a free online informational
resource that connects diverse grassroots educational projects with individuals and
organizations that can meet their needs for human and material resources. Our website is
an ever-growing database of formal and informal educational projects around the globe,
and as such it provides a necessary service both to those in need of help and those able to
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give. By allowing our partners to represent their work on our website, we enable them to
harness the power of the Internet and speak to a global audience about their visions and
needs. At the same time, by providing this information to the world free of cost, we
enable individuals and communities everywhere to build meaningful relationships with
projects that can benefit from their support.
The Omprakash Foundation offers a model of global education that empowers
people everywhere to become more conscious participants in processes of social
transformation. By constantly building new partnerships with schools, volunteers, and
donors around the planet, and then “connecting the dots” through the network that
manifests itself in our website, we facilitate communication and collaboration between
different social actors working to actualize a new vision for education. By doing so, we
allows a global community to realize its own fundamental interconnectedness, and we
believe that this realization—and the human relationships that it spawns—must be the
bedrock of social change in this new century. Indeed, it is exactly this realization that
fuels the fire from which this entire project has emerged.
The work of Omprakash Foundation embodies a unique methodology that
identifies human communication and relationships as fundamental sources of global
empowerment and positive social action. We serve as a hub for a growing movement of
engaged educational partnerships, and at the center of this network is our website: an
ever-expanding, user-generated database of diverse grassroots educational projects, with
a vast array of specific projects listing the needs for volunteers, money, curricular
materials, and support information. By giving these projects a platform from which to
speak to the world, we not only help them advance their own educational work; we also
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help others learn about the ways in which the world is changing and how they can take
part.
My formal responsibilities with Omprakash include fundraising, marketing,
website design, accounting, and constantly corresponding with our many partners at
home and abroad. I am proud to say that my time at Bowdoin has enabled me to
introduce our network not just to the college community, but also to Brunswick High
School, Mt. Ararat High School, Longfellow Elementary School, and Wiscasset
Elementary School. I have also begun working to connect these communities with the
Portland Housing Authority and the immigrant populations that it serves in the areas of
Kennedy Park and Riverton. Meanwhile, my co-directors are working to help expand our
network in California, Boston, Baltimore, and beyond. These efforts often yield
volunteers and fundraisers, but their basic intent is much simpler: we aim to help people
learn about their world, and we consider this learning—this global consciousness—to be
an unquestionable prerequisite for service in the twenty-first century.
My co-directors and I receive no compensation for our work—all of us are either
employed as teachers or are currently still pursuing college degrees. I am endlessly
grateful for the camaraderie and advice that my colleagues provide, and it is with utter
seriousness that I identify them as my “co-directors.” Yet if there is a place for candor, it
is here, and thus I am compelled to make it clear that this project has been created and
sustained by my vision, my efforts, and my fire. I ask no special credit for this fact: it is
all part of my submission, and the final reward comes not in formal recognition or any
sense of achievement or accomplishment. It comes instead in every moment of my work,
every fiber of my tired body and every word that tumbles from my tired mouth.
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My work with Omprakash has grown from a fundamental sense of humility, a
conviction that responsible global citizenship demands uncertainty, flexibility, and a
constant willingness to learn. Not coincidentally, it is this same conviction that has
enabled me to bring my fire to the Bowdoin classroom: learning about the world no
longer seems to unfold in the ivory tower; it no longer seems passive or elitist. For me,
learning has become service, and service itself now seems to begin and end with learning.
The logo of Omprakash is an empty bowl: a symbol of our own—my own—intention to
remain open, uncertain, thirsty to learn, compelled to serve, and eager to share. This
emblem captures not just the work of one organization or one aspect of my life; it
represents who I am, what I do, and what I hold to be true. Needless to say, I no longer
feel that this truth is betrayed by my presence at Bowdoin.
As I write these words, I am scrambling to prepare for another day of teaching
world history to fifty-two ninth-graders whose learning has been my responsibility since
January 5th. I feel blessed to be able to spend my last semester at Bowdoin studentteaching, and I look forward to a life of unknown adventures in and out of the classroom,
forever a teacher and a learner; forever blurring the line between the two and allowing
both to encompass the meaning of service. The question of how to reconcile my desire to
learn with my duty to serve is no longer a question for me; I no longer feel torn between
opposites as I did in my late adolescence. It is all one fire, and I offer myself into it
without hesitation.
People who can testify to my personal contribution to service:
Susie Dorn
Cindy Stocks
Scott Meiklejohn
Tim Foster
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