One of the very first things that strikes a visitor to The Institutes is the international feeling that is present everywhere. The flags of thirty nations grace the entrance way between the long expanse of stone walls that reach many yards on either side.
The flags make The Institutes look like the United Nations. In a sense there is no place where the unity of nations is more strongly felt than at The Institutes. In another sense, there is no place where national origins have less significance.
When a new staff member joins the team, he quickly sheds his national identity and takes up the mantle of a citizen of the world. This is an idea one hears bandied about a good deal along with the concept of the "global village." But at The Institutes these are not ideas or concepts, they are everyday realities. This shedding of one's country of origin and replacing it with a deep sense of responsibility for the whole world is a very important dividing line between the staff candidate who will ultimately succeed and one who will not.
Parents have found their way here from every inhabited continent on earth and from almost every nation. We have marveled at the determination of a Rumanian widow who, with her profoundly brain-injured fifteen-year-old, fought her way here almost twenty years ago from one of the most repressive regimes in the world. She somehow got through the Iron Curtain not once but many times. She spoke no English and had little money and no way to communicate with us between visits, but somehow she got her "autistic" son reading, writing , playing the piano, doing superb mathematics, talking, and able to take care of himself completely, after he'd spent his whole life up to that point playing with string.
Or there is the Italian couple who had to reserve four seats on the airplane so that their comatose daughter would have the space she needed to make the trip to Philadelphia. The people of their little Italian town had helped them to raise the funds to pay the incredible airfares every visit.
Or consider the hundreds of Japanese parents who have found a way to come from the other side of the world every six months for the sake of their brain-injured children.
The vast majority of these people have not been well off. The astounding truth is that our families have always been from the struggling end of the middle and working class. They were struggling to survive before they had a hurt child and yet, once they realized they had a child in trouble, they still found the strength and determination to make it to Philadelphia over and over again to get help.
It is these people who have made us citizens of the world.
Before they arrive in Philadelphia they search their own countries and other countries for answers for their hurt children. In so doing, they often suffer at the hands of those who do not value the lives of a brain-injured children and who would warehouse and forget hurt children rather than admit their own ignorance.
This false despair only sharpens the edge of the anger that compels parents to fight their way here. They arrive weary from these skirmishes and scarred by them, but determined to enlist in the battle to defeat their children's brain injuries.
These parents return home not with a program so much as with a battle plan. It is not a battle plan by accident, it is a battle plan on purpose. It is a war they are fighting and it is a war they have come to win. Every parent knows this, and so does every staff member.
And so the battle lines are drawn. Each parent returns to his or her nation and wages that war every day. Every morning they rise to fight again, and every night they take stock of what victories have been won that day. Every six months they return to headquarters, and together we evaluate how the war is going and make a new battle plan.
How do they do it?
They tell us that doing it is much easier than not doing it. But along the way they learn about how those battle lines clarify one's life and the lives of one's family. They say that their family knows what it means to pull together to insure that the wounded one doesn't get left behind. Many wisely recognize that one day many years from now they will look back at this battle and know it was their finest hour.
Sometimes, when we are very, very smart and have all the right answers and when parents are very, very tough, we win the war. In almost every issue since the very first issue of THE IN-REPORT in 1973, these victories have been heralded. Indeed, it is the very reason that THE IN-REPORT exists.
But sometimes, even after Herculean efforts on the part of the family and the staff, we don't win the war. Some families put down their arms and wait for us to build a better arsenal of solutions for their hurt children. Some families never put down their arms. They fight on no matter what.
And so they continue to come from the four corners of the earth.
They can't afford it, but they never count the cost.
They often don't speak English, but they understand everything we say.
They love peace, but they come to fight a war.
They come from Mexico and Brazil and Italy and Japan and Belgium and France and Morocco and England and Malaysia and Nigeria and Canada and Poland and Norway and Scotland.
It doesn't matter from where they come. When there is a battle to be fought and a war to be waged, the battle lines know no national boundaries. When a child's life hangs in the balance, men and women and children pull together, regardless of language or custom or culture.
The United Nations is based on the hope that one day nations will be united. At The Institutes that hope has long ago become a reality. And having reached that reality the nations have disappeared entirely, to be replaced by the Family of Man, united on the battle lines together, winning the war, one child at a time.
by Janet Doman
Director
