Excerpted from Me to We: Turning Self-Help On Its Head by Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger. Copyright 2004 by Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger. Excerpted, with permission by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
In our travels, we have met some exceptional people who have made us rethink the values and trends of our North American lifestyle. One young man prompted us to reexamine our sense of community as reflected through television and American pop culture. We met him while traveling through the Andes Mountains in Ecuador on a visit to one of the primary schools that Free the Children had helped to construct. That night, sitting around the fire, we asked him what had brought him to this remote part of the world. He answered that he had been searching for a place where there was no TV.
He told us that he had been a participant on the first ever show of the phenomenally successful Survivor television series. In this program, a group of strangers are stranded in an exotic but isolated location. The group is divided into two tribes that compete against each other every week in staged contests. The losing tribe must vote off a member, until, in the final episode, only two contenders remain to vie for a $1 million prize. As you can imagine, the competition tends to bring out the worst in the participants. Petty complaints are aired on camera behind the backs of other tribe members. Bold-faced lies are shamelessly told; pacts are made and broken; alliances are betrayed and teammates are stabbed in the back.
The show was a phenomenal success. Viewers got hooked because it was 'reality' television, and they identified with the ruthless competition they witnessed.
The former cast member we met went on to explain that at the end of the show, he returned to the United States to unexpected fame and fortune. A modeling agency quickly signed him on and he received offers to appear in well paying commercials. He dated one of the other Survivor participants and came to be known as "the guy from Survivor" everywhere he went.
Gradually, though, he felt trapped in Survivor -- not the role itself, but in the constant rivalry it stood for. All around him, he saw relationships treated like commodities and it felt as though he was always in a competition with people to get ahead. In the end he chose to vote himself off the island... of North America. He bought a one-way ticket to South America and spent the better part of a year traveling from one small, impoverished village to another, with everything he owned in a backpack. He was amazed at the generosity of the 'poor' people he met, he told us, and in these villages, he found a richness of life that he had been missing. He ended up working with a local charitable group in a caring community to which he could belong, where people didn't plot to edge him out, but valued and respected what he brought to their lives. It was everything he lacked in his old life in North America.
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