STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Etienne Blumberg came face to face with the life that might have been hers this past winter when she and her mother Judy visited the Chinese orphanage in Heifei where she started her life.
She was 18 months when she was adopted. Most of the children who were there when she was are still there. They will never be adopted because of cleft palates and other disabilities, officials told her.
Blumberg expressed her reaction to what she’d seen in a mask that she created for Community School’s annual 7th Grade Intolerance Projects, which were unveiled this past week.
Ninety-five percent of orphans in China have special needs. And most have little access to education, she said. It’s rare to see a wheelchair on the street. And many employers resist hiring people who are deformed, or otherwise disabled because they think it invites bad luck.
The mask she created symbolizes how China hides its disabled citizens. Its eyes are closed, representing the way the country’s leaders try to ignore or are oblivious to the plight of those citizens.
Cracks run through the mask. And part of the mask is missing, showing how an entire segment of the population is missing from daily life. Duct tape over the mouth signifies that the disabled don’t have a say in how they live.
“The Chinese don’t want those who are not normal to be out in public because they want to be shown as perfect,” said Blumberg. “Only a quarter of those who are disabled go to school with others. Forty percent of the disabled in China can’t read or write.”
Community School seventh-graders have tackled important issues during a term-long Intolerance Project for the past 17 years. The final project is a piece of art that incorporates the topics the students have researched.
Past topics have addressed plastic in the ocean, body image, animal rights and even the relationship between skiers and snowboarders. Often, several students choose the same subject, as was the case last year when several addressed adverse effects of too much social media.
This year’s topics were very diverse and very individualistic, said teacher Joel Vilinsky.
Matthew Letourneau addressed the plight of 700,000 Rohingya Muslims driven from their homes by a Myanmar army in what some are calling ethnic cleansing.
A Buddha statue crushing an open Koran represented the Buddhist oppression. Ribbons representing blood streamed down from the Buddha’s eyes like tears.
“One is not called noble who harms living things,” said an inscription from The Buddha.
“I didn’t think there were places in the world where people oppressed and murdered like that, anymore,” said Letourneau.
Letourneau also placed bodies of people with pills in their stomachs, along with pills resembling antibiotics stuck in lettuce, around the statue to represent antibiotic resistance.
Two million Americans become resistant to antibiotics every year caused by farm animals being fed antibiotics, Letourneau said. And 23,000 of those die every year because the antibiotics they’re given to fight health problems do no good.
People are putting others’ health in jeopardy because they’re greedy,” he said. “This project has taught me to know to pay attention and question events.
Robby Cullen created a sea monster representing salmon that have become deformed because of wild fish breeding with 300,000 non-native salmon escaping from fish farms in the San Juan Islands and elsewhere. Illegal pesticides and sewage has contributed to the problem, he said.
“They’re still allowed to serve many of these fish in restaurants and supermarkets,” he said. “But, don’t worry. It is getting better. The State of Washington has banned the farming of Atlantic salmon and other non-native fish.”
Maeve Bailey constructed a piece she called “Broken Equality”—a scale that showed the inequality in a world where there are more CEOs named John than Jane.
Women on average make .77 cents for every dollar men are paid, she said. When women turn 60, they have to work 10 more years to make up the difference. At the current rate of improvement, she added, women won’t realize equal pay until 2059.
“I got interested in this because there’s been like a huge thing going on this year over women’s rights and women’s pay. I believe everyone should have equal rights,” she added.
Annabel Viesturs wrapped a bicycle chain around a globe to depict earth’s emotional roller coaster caused by melting ice and rising oceans caused in part, she said by the burning of fossil fuels .
“Our rivers in the sky that transport water vapor have been getting bigger and longer, and they can cause a lot of rain that we’re not used to,” she said. We can’t stop it but we can slow it down.”
Zander Douglas, meanwhile, brought a gun to school—in the name of the Intolerance Project.
The rifle represented the destruction of forests.
“In a hundred years the Amazon rainforest will be gone,” he said. “And that’s the biggest rainforest in the world—bigger than Australia.”