Khaled Hosseini on the crucial role of storytelling and empathy to drive positive change
On Nov. 4, 2017, The Tech launched The Tech for Global Good program by honoring social entrepreneurs using technology to save lives around the globe. The year-long program brings the stories of these laureates to the museum floor in a new exhibition and encourages young people to discover their own potential to solve global challenges. Applied Materials presented author Khaled Hosseini with the 2017 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award at the launch celebration. Hosseini, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, delivered the following remarks on why he believes that inspiring the next generation is so crucial to solving our own community’s social challenges and to improving the plight of people around the world.
It is such an honor to be the recipient of this award. Thank you, Jim and Becky Morgan, for supporting this program and lending your name to this award. Thank you everyone at The Tech, Tim Ritchie, Maria Pappas, Linda Tsai, my friend Sue Foltz, not only for this recognition, and not only for recognizing the achievements of our brilliant and remarkable five laureates, but also for turning this evening, and indeed the mission of The Tech itself, into an occasion to celebrate the inner innovator in us all, especially young people, the next generation of changemakers in whose hands it will fall to take on the most urgent challenges facing our species and our planet.
In a way, it’s ironic that I should stand here, because as my family knows well, I am one of the least tech-savvy people in Silicon Valley. The peak of my tech career was the time I successfully downloaded and used Dropbox. So, in Tech for Global Good, I don’t have that much useful to say about the tech part.
But I can say a word two about the second part, or at least the need for it. Specifically with regard to refugees, a population that is of special concern to me, given that I came to this country as a refugee myself back in 1980 after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Today we are facing an unprecedented displacement crisis. In fact, for each minute that I stand up here tonight holding the mike, another 20 people will have been forcibly displaced, because of violence, persecution or economic desperation. They will add to the 65 million-plus who are already displaced around the globe. Over 22 million of them are refugees, the overwhelming majority of whom live not in the U.S., or Canada, or Europe, as some of the day’s rhetoric would lead you to believe, but in developing countries with enormous socioeconomic obstacles of their own, and where the already limited resources are being stretched to their very snapping point. More than half of refugees typically are under the age of 18, and in every refugee population, the majority is made up of women and children, two groups particularly vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and sexual violence.
I have had a chance to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan and other places with the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, a terrific organization I urge everyone to learn more about. In these countries, I’ve had the chance to sit and speak with a number of displaced people. In part, I use these trips to try to understand the big picture. What are the forces that cause these major population movements? What drives families to attempt crossing the Mediterranean aboard faulty, overcrowded boats run by smugglers whose livelihood feeds on human suffering? What are the mechanisms in place to absorb these populations, to meet the needs of these populations, to safeguard their basic rights to legal protection and food and shelter and water and education? So, big picture stuff.
But maybe more importantly, I try to complement the stats and figures with stories, because it’s through story that I’ve always understood human experience in a fuller, deeper, more meaningful way. The young Syrian boy I met in Iraq, for instance, who won’t make eye contact, who I learn later had found the bodies of his classmates on the street after a bomb went off near his apartment building in Aleppo. The young South Sudanese single mother of three I sat with in a mud shelter in Northern Uganda, who had, in an act of extraordinary altruism, agreed to adopt an abandoned child who was paralyzed on the left side, who could not walk, sit up, speak, feed or clean herself. The Dinka teacher, who during a quiet moment, looked at me with liquid eyes and a tremor in his voice said, I wonder why God made me a refugee? How much longer? When can I go home again and be with my own people?
But I want to expand the word story to denote more than an anecdote or a narrative with plot and character. I mean “story” as a set of ideas that communicate human values in a manner that resonates, in a way that permits another human being to see its relevance to his or her own existence. I mean “story” as the instrument we use at the workshop where meaning is forged of our short lives. Because we are a species with brains wired for metaphor. Sure, we use our brains to analyze, measure, predict — in short, to understand. But only when that understanding becomes bedfellows with our humanity, our emotions, with the essential human consciousness residing within us, only then do we act for good. Storytelling is at the heart of all human endeavor and social change. Stories wins elections. They start political movements and wars; they end them too. They liberate the oppressed and build economies. Stories are the engine behind all the good, and misdeed, that mankind visits upon itself.
“We use our brains to analyze, measure, predict — in short, to understand. But only when that understanding becomes bedfellows with our humanity, our emotions, with the essential human consciousness residing within us, only then do we act for good.”
So it behooves us to tell one another, especially our youth, the right kinds of stories, those that reconnect us, those that guide us to live with vulnerability, respect and purpose. Those that foster positive change.
On the topic of change, it may seem heretical to say this here, at The Tech, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the digital era, but technology itself changes nothing. We have, after all, the technological means to feed every human soul on the planet. And yet, at this moment, people are starving in Yemen, they’re starving in South Sudan, in Nigeria, Somalia. Technology is like a boat. To be a force for good, it needs the wind of the right story blowing in its sails.
And so that’s why I think Tech for Global Good is such a powerful and important story, I repeat, especially for the young. I love particularly the global part, not Tech for Good, but Tech for Global Good. Because it inspires our youth, first and foremost, to expand their sense of community. It says, your community can be your neighborhood, or your school, or your city. But it can be more, much more, than that. Because a community is more than just a whole lot of people who have a language or culture in common. The cliché may be that we live in an interconnected global community, but we do, it’s true, and it is a complicated organism, this community, and it needs all sorts of people in order to thrive. People who work with their hands, those who work with their minds. It needs the experience of older generations, but crucially, indispensably, it needs new blood and fresh ideas from future innovators and changemakers.
For me, Tech for Global Good is about inviting young people to feel like an organic part of that wider community, to recognize its pains and challenges with a critical eye, and to use the lingua franca of technology to find solutions with an open, hopeful and curious heart. So that one day, they too can help the blind see and the disabled speak. It’s about bringing young people face-to-face with the problems of the world they will inherit in a matter of time — refugees, poverty, hunger, climate change — and asking: How would you fix it?
That is the story that this evening is about, that is the story we are celebrating, and I could not be more grateful, or more proud, to be a small part of it. Thank you.
© Khaled Hosseini
© UNHCR/Jordi Matas
