Appreciating the contributions of parents and generations before them was the message speakers emphasized as they addressed a crowd that included 60 graduating high school seniors at Saturday's commencement exercises at Episcopal Collegiate School in Little Rock.
Commencement speaker Dr. Claire Pierre told the students that it was after seeing people suffer from poor health in Miami, Chicago and her home country of Haiti because they couldn't afford medical care, that she decided to study medicine so she could make a difference locally and globally.
When she returned to Haiti on a medical mission, Pierre -- who serves as the director of the program in Health Systems Strengthening and Social Change in Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine -- noticed that HIV/AIDS patients at one clinic were not dying from the disease that she remembered as killing many people while she was growing up.
It was something Pierre said she thought she would never see.
"We came a long way because the people who came before us chose to live a driven, purpose-filled life," Pierre told the students.
Senior-class speaker Houston Downes, 18, said he and his classmates wouldn't be where they are without the help of others.
"We know that without all the people in our lives we could not become the people we dream of being," he said.
All 60 students from the small private school in Little Rock will be headed to college in the fall. Some are going as far away as Palo Alto, Calif., to attend Stanford University and Hanover, N.H., to attend Dartmouth College.
Turner Kennedy, 18, said he felt liberated after graduating, but also like he was again at the bottom of a hill to climb.
Kennedy said he will attend Lyon College in Batesville to study toward becoming a psychologist or possibly entering pre-medicine to be come a psychiatrist.
After the ceremony, Kennedy's parents, Robert and Jo Ann Kennedy, snapped photos of their only child and chatted with people who stopped by to offer their congratulations.
The couple said they will miss having their son and his friends around the house, but they were excited to see him graduate Saturday.
"It's a big transition," said Jo Ann Kennedy.
Sarah Samuels, 18, who also will be attending Lyon College in Batesville to study pre-medicine and possibly major in biology, said she was ecstatic to graduate Saturday.
She said she found Pierre's speech especially inspiring because she had read Mountains Beyond Mountains, a book by Tracy Kidder. The nonfiction narrative traces the work of Dr. Paul Farmer who spent his life fighting tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru and Russia.
Pierre had assisted Farmer as a volunteer at the United Nations office of the special envoy to Haiti with President Bill Clinton in 2009.
"I aspire to help as much as I can and make a difference in my community," Samuels said.
Metro on 05/18/2014