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February 2005 Growing Hope from Darkness
Many in our community, including some of you who read this magazine, I presume, will have lost family, friends, or business associates in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Southern Asia on December 26. As Stanford President John Hennessy said at a campus vigil in early January, this University has become a neighborhood in a global village, and so we no longer can expect a disaster halfway around the globe to feel remote. As winter classes began, several hundred of us gathered with heavy hearts in Memorial Church to express unity and sympathy with the many survivors whose lives have been upended by of one of greatest natural disasters in history. As I write this, Business School students especially are grieving over the particular loss of second-year MBA student James Hsu. A native of California who was interested in using his skills beyond its borders, James was among about two dozen GSB students who participated in a study trip to Singapore and Thailand over the December class break. With a handful of classmates, he stayed on to vacation on Thailand’s Koh Phi Phi island, and he was at a resort on the beach when the tsunami struck there. After days of searches for him by a classmate and his family, James is presumed to have perished. Classmate Laura Wales was seriously injured by the powerful water and remained hospitalized in Bangkok as students, faculty, and staff returned to campus for classes. Second-year student Lorri Elder, who also had participated in the study trip, noted the difficulty she and others were having accepting the death of their classmate. “James was in his mid-twenties; he was about to take on the world with his entrepreneurial ideas,” she told the gathered mourners. She compared him to Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid at age 15, and compared those of us left behind to Leland’s parents, who, in their grief, built a university that would “make incredible things possible for a myriad of young people.” “If anyone can band together in a spirit of generosity after a tragedy like this, it is the Stanford community, it is our Business School community,” she said. “We must honor James by coming together, remembering the goodness and taking this darkness and growing from it something hopeful and greater than ourselves.” One way to begin this process is to contribute in James Hsu’s memory to the Red Cross relief efforts, a fundraising effort organized by the MBA Class of 2005. More information is available on the Stanford Business School website at www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/hsu_howto_donate.shtml. There most assuredly will be other direct and indirect ways you, members of this neighborhood, will join the rebuilding. As Hennessy phrased it at the vigil, “Many of us belong to faiths that call us to be people of action, and that has always been the Stanford way.” |
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