Transcript

The Power of a Smile | Brad Corrigan | TEDxBerkshires

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Hdz-1z2rk
Video ID: g_Hdz-1z2rk
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[Music] [Music] Do not go in the garbage dump. Don't go there. They said to me, "It's the least safe place you could go. Even the police won't go in there." And a few days later, I was in a taxi cab and we were going toward the trash dump. Because our driver had said, "If you're here to serve kids in our country, the ones that have the greatest need, they're up ahead." And I thought trash dump and kids like what the trash and kids do not go together in a sentence. They don't go together in a place that I must not be understanding this. I didn't speak Spanish. All I could [Music] tell smoke looked like hell. And still we drove straight. There was this sense of I am not safe in this car. I have a camera worth more than anything I've seen outside this car. Where am I here? I'm going to get jumped. I'm going to lock the doors. Oh, I'm going to roll up the windows. Man, why did I choose to come into this trash dump with this driver? Oh man. Are those Those are kids. They're barefoot. They're barefoot. Those are roof lines. Oh man. There's a whole community of people living inside this trash dump. What? Everything inside me was freezing, misfiring. I had I took the camera up. I took some pictures because I really needed the barrier. But at least I had pictures. And then we were like, man, let's get out of here. I couldn't take it anymore. And as we were leaving, knock, this girl rode up on her bicycle with this huge smile. I wrote in my journal. Have you ever seen a lightning smile like this before? In a trash dump? Out of the smoke and dust comes this girl on a bike laughing and smiling so big, knocking on the window. The window comes down and I say, "Hi." And she says, "Hi, I'm [Music] Ilana." Hi, I'm Brad. and I am a musician and a storyteller and so grateful to get to share some stories with you today about kids and families that um so rarely have spotlight and are so deserving of it because of their bravery and their courage. Sure enough, there is a trash dump community in Managa, Nicaragua. It's called Lereka and 300 families live there, have worked there. They choose to move through the trash fields to scavenge for recyclables in order to to survive, in order to put food on the table. And so many of those people there are kids, vulnerable kids. So meeting Ilana just was uh mindblowing to me that someone could be filled with joy and light with such a diabolical, horrific, hellish backdrop. just crazy. But I grew up in a place not like that at all. I grew up in Denver, Colorado, in a family that had everything. We had a big yard and we had private schools and a country club to play tennis and soccer in the summer. And I thought this was normal. I thought everyone went on a vacation once a year. And I just thought as a kid that everybody had what I had. Music was in my family, so I had a deep appreciation for it and and really loved it. But there was a point in my life where I actually needed it. U when I was 14, I came home and saw a for sale sign in our front yard and I sat down with my sister Kelly and my parents and my dad explained to us that we needed to sell our house and we needed to move and pretty quickly because he had just lost um our fam his business and our family's money and security in an investment scandal. And for the next three years through high school, um, we moved 10 times. And one of the only things that was consistent for me was music and friendship and sports. That's all I really had and just leaned into it. When I went to college, I found some more friends that loved making music and we started a band, Dispatch, and played lots of shows in Boston and New York and just slowly but surely pulled uh, our dream together. And before we knew it, the filesharing world, Napster, collided with us um in a way that was really uh awesome for us. We weren't on the radio at the time and our music just went everywhere. We didn't realize it. So in the process of making music, playing every night that we could, driving everywhere, saying yes to every show, we lost a sense as to who we were and our friendships. So literally as things were going like this, we had a farewell show in 2004 in Boston and over 100,000 people showed up and they sang with us every word. Felt like another for sale sign went in right then. Lost my identity again. Who am I apart from this band? What do I do? I said yes to a trip to Nicaragua. I had friends that were surfing down there. There was an orphanage where I could play guitar and kick a soccer ball. And there was a youth rally where I could make music and so I went. That set us on a path to go into the trash dump. It's as if that was exactly why I was there. And our driver, Bismar, was like, "We are going there. You are safe." And I believed him. But going in was the scariest thing I think I've ever done. I at the time I thought it was the dumbest thing I've ever said yes to. I don't think this is going to go right. And then Leiana knocks on the window and her smile changed everything. Have you ever had a smile from someone that you didn't expect that changed everything for you? On a day when you just thought that the world was mean and cold, a stranger looks up and they look at you and they lean in and they smile as if to say, "I see you." As if to say, "I'm inviting you to see me." Iliana's smile that day is why I got out of the car. It's why I followed her around in a place where I thought, "This is not going to go well for me." But her smile and her laughter were so reassuring that I went where she went and I met the people who she loved. And from that point until today, I've never been the same. I will never be the same. And I hope you won't be either. Those of you that are taking in Ilana's story and getting to see her smile firsthand, that is the smile. That's the day we met her. Does that look like a a hesitant smile? Does that look like a guarded smile? Someone who's kind of like looking at you saying, "You're a stranger, but I'm going to give you." No, that looks like she's welcoming family. I've been so amazed by the light in this picture where it's she's just kind of saying here I am and there you are. Here I am and there you [Music] are. Here I am and there you are. And who knows where this will go. Oh, I like that Ilana made the trash dump a safe place for us. She her smile was a bit of a gateway for us to come in and we started playing music there and started imagining what can we do for the kids here. And so we built a stage in the heart of the trash dump and started something called the day of light where there were broken walls that were gray and we brought muralists in to just light them up with rainbows of color and all kinds of beautiful uh murals and graffiti went up. And then soccer, oh the dirtiest soccer you've ever seen, was played everywhere. And we had professional soccer players that came down with us, lacrosse players, frisbes, face paint, people from all over just came to just enjoy life together. That was the day of light. And that became such a sacred way of connecting with them and making music and feeling like, hey, even though we're not speaking the same language and even though we come from such different places, we don't look alike, we have hardly anything in common, we have everything in common now. Right now we're communicating there is a higher language than what comes from here comes from here. Just as we're feeling confident that this is our greatest thing we can do in the trash dump. We discovered that a number of the girls Ilana and her sisters were really they were coughing a lot and they seemed sick. And so their parents invited us to take them to a clinic. And we took him to a clinic and the doctors there were like, "Who are you and why are these girls here right now? They should have been here months ago. Do you not understand how sick they are?" No, we don't understand. Bismar, our driver, understood everything in in Spanish, and he was the one that took the story back to the parents. But all three girls, Ilana, and her sisters, had HIV AIDS. I thought I I thought I didn't hear it right and I asked and Bismar said no be ache HIV. So then I'm learning from the social workers that are in the community. Yeah, there's a lot of child prostitution here and it's likely that these girls were a part of that. Yeah, there's a lot of drug abuse. There are families that actually will hook the kids on drugs so that they'll work longer hours in the fields to to gather recyclables for them. Yeah, there's lots of violence here. There's so many layers of abuse, Brad. You have no idea. I had no idea. I had no idea. And the story doesn't uh get any better from here. Mercedes died a year later. Iliana died two years later. Several of their several of their siblings have passed away. Kids have died in that community because they were not safe. They didn't have a school where they could really flourish and reach and be fed. They didn't have what they needed. They didn't have safety. Letting go of I felt really guilty. How did I not see it sooner? Why was I playing concerts? Why were we painting murals when what was going on in the shadows? These kids were having their lives broken and sold. We inventoried our hearts. We looked at our journals. We looked in our cameras. We looked at what we had filmed. And we realized that we had a story where we thought we were documenting these kids and their bravery and strength that they would tell their own stories. And we realized that now we had been given their stories to tell. It should have been them. It should have been them to tell their own stories. Today, we have a documentary film called Iliana's Smile that honors Iliana's life and Mercedes and a lot of the children that I've told you about today. And that film will be used to raise awareness and funding to build Ilana's school of hope so that countless kids will not have the same path that Iliana and Mercedes did. They'll be safe to flourish, to reach, to dream. They'll they'll be able to grow. They'll be able to be fed. But don't forget the power of your smile. Don't forget Illana's smile may not be in this room right now, but it is in my heart forever. She is a spiritual tattoo on me, making me want to look up and to lean in and to smile at people who I don't know, that don't look anything like me. She looked at me like I was family and gave me this aha moment in my journal where I was like, what would it be like if I saw the world as family and not strangers? Family versus strangers. It's our choice every day, isn't it? Do we belong to each other? And if we do, then we live this way or do we not belong to each other? And if we don't, then we live this way. It's a huge question. It all started with Iliana's smile. So look up from where you are in a subway. Look up and smile at someone across the way. in an airport, look up and see someone walking by and smile long enough to say, "I see you. I see value in you. We belong." Look up and share your smile and carry the smiles that we carry. And let's ripple that out into the world to bring light into the darkness. The tagline on Iliana smile says there's always light in the darkness. That's it. I'm gonna try something here and uh take this moment and now put it through the ukulele for for a new song to finish this up. [Music] May they see [Music] you in every way. Your smile opened up the door. Seemed like one, then two, then so many more. You have no idea. [Music] The power of your smile. Always let them see it. Always lean in and share it. The power of your smile [Music] today. I heard there's no place in this world more dangerous than where I found treasure beyond what I could ever [Music] see. Lean in. Push through for those that will follow. So you may see the [Music] truth when you shared your smile. Oh, let them see you. I hope they will see you in your short and bold and beautiful life. [Music] I'll never know where it will go, what it will unlock inside of you. But I see you when I choose to look up and send you on your [Music] way. If we could do it again, oh, I wouldn't change a thing. No, nothing. But I would lay my life down for you. Share your smile. Oh, always let them see you. Oh, you got to share it. You'll never know what it can do. [Music]