Virtues, Bones, and Tolerance

This blog has been a long time coming.  At our last meeting I made a promise to the One Million Bones (OMB) team that I would start blogging from a personal perspective about the project.  Tonight, finally, I will start.  My name is Naomi Natale, I am the artist who came up with this idea.  I work with an amazing team who volunteer so much of their time and skills because they believe in this vision, and I am humbled and honored to work among them.

Last Friday, Noel and I went to East San Jose school in Albuquerque.  Noel is our awesome Education Coordinator.  There we spoke to over 200 4^th and 5^th grade students in 6 classes.  The experience was truly moving. 

For the past few weeks the students had been studying their virtues under the guidance of their teacher, Amy Sweet, who loved our project and wanted to bring it into her classroom.  We began the lesson asking the students about their virtues.  Which ones they possess, which ones their friends posses, and inquiring what acts they do that show them off. We then went on to question how do we find the virtues in people that we don’t really like.  What can we do to find them and to seek them out in these people.

We decided that our virtues are very much like our bones, that though we cannot see them we know that they exist and that they make us who we are.  We also decided that EVERYBODY has virtues just like EVERYBODY has bones.

We talked and shared about what happens when we do not see or look for the virtues in others. How that can lead to name calling, bullying, fighting and conflicts.  We talked about how this played into our own lives and in our stories we described how people get hurt, bones are broken, families are broken, communities are broken.  One young boy shared a personal account about how his father had been killed by a family member when he was eleven months old.  At a recent family event this family member asked if he forgave him and the young boy said he had.  Forgiveness is truly a heroic act, and we have much to learn from our youth…

One of my favorite stories that came out of the day was from 2 young girls who were sitting next to each other in our second class.  They explained how they didn’t like each other at all when they first met but were forced by another classmate to get to know each other.  Now they are best friends, and their love for each other is very visible.  When one of the girls became emotional recalling a personal account of intolerance, her best friend wrapped her arms around her and held on for a long while.

I left the school very moved and inspired by how much these children offered from their lives, how many personal and overwhelming stories of pain and courage and compassion were told.  At the end of each lesson we invited the students to make a bone for those all over the world whose virtues were not seen or valued in their communities or by their governments.  We promised that we would bring their bones to Washington so that world leaders could bear witness to their actions.

On behalf of all the 4^th and 5^th grade students at East San Jose… To all the children in Sudan, Congo, Uganda and Burma we offer you these bones, these stories, and our voices.  Your virtues we hold and do not forget.