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Finding Strength Together

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

IN 1972, a plane flying from Uruguay to Chile crashed into a mountain in the Andes, split in half, and barreled down a snowy slope. For the thirty-three survivors, this was just the beginning of an extraordinary ordeal. Over the next seventy-two days, the group battled shock, frostbite, avalanches, and starvation. Only sixteen of them made it out. Alive.

Thanks to the popular book and movie, many of us know the extreme measures taken by the group in order to survive. New analysis by Spencer Harrison—a researcher, mountain climber, and colleague of Adam’s—explains not just how these men survived, but why. Spencer tracked down four of the survivors, combed through their journals, and even visited the crash site with one of them. Every survivor’s story shared a common theme: a key to their resilience was hope.

Most of the forty-five people on board were rugby players in their late teens and early twenties traveling to an exhibition match. Damage to the plane’s radio meant they could not send communications, but they could still receive them. Their first plan was to wait for rescue in the shelter of the plane. “We all believed that rescue was our only chance of survival,” Nando Parrado wrote, “and we clung to that hope with an almost religious zeal.” Nine days later, their supplies were depleted. The group was forced to turn to their only remaining source of food: the flesh from the frozen bodies of their teammates who had died. The next morning, a few of the passengers heard over the radio that the search had been called off. “We mustn’t tell them,” said the team captain. “At least let them go on hoping.” Another passenger, Gustavo Nicolich, disagreed. “Good news!” he shouted. “We’re going to get out of here on our own.”

We normally think of hope as something individuals hold in their heads and in their hearts. But people can build hope together. By creating a shared identity, individuals can form a group that has a past and a brighter future.

“Some people say, ‘If there’s life, there’s hope,’ ” survivor Roberto Canessa explained. “But for us, it was the opposite: ‘If there’s hope, there’s life.’ ” During long, cold, and hungry days, the crash survivors prayed together. They planned projects to launch after returning to civilization: one passenger spoke of opening a restaurant, another dreamed of having a farm. Each night, two of the survivors looked at the moon and imagined that right then their parents were looking at the same moon. Another took pictures to record their plight. Many wrote letters to their families declaring their will to live. “To maintain faith at all times, despite our setbacks, we had to become alchemists,” survivor Javier Methol said. “Changing tragedy into a miracle, depression into hope.”

Of course hope by itself isn’t enough. Many of the passengers had hope yet still lost their lives. But hope keeps people from giving in to despair. Researchers find that hope springs up and persists when “communities of people generate new images of possibility.” Believing in new possibilities helps people fight back against the idea of permanence and propels them to seek out new options; they find the will and the way to move forward. Psychologists call this “grounded hope”—the understanding that if you take action you can make things better. “I never stopped praying for the arrival of our rescuers, or for the intercession of God,” Parrado recalled. “But at the same time the cold-blooded voice that had urged me to save my tears was always whispering in the back of my mind: ‘No one will find us. We will die here. We must make a plan. We must save ourselves.’ ”

Parrado and Canessa set out on a trek with a third survivor and nearly froze to death before locating the tail of the plane, which contained insulation that they turned into a sleeping bag. Nearly two months after the crash, this makeshift sleeping bag allowed Parrado and Canessa to launch another expedition. They hiked thirty-three miles across treacherous terrain, scaling a 14,000-foot peak. After ten days, they spotted a man on horseback. The fourteen other survivors were rescued by helicopter.

The community formed by the Alive survivors has stayed close for decades. Each year they gather on the anniversary of their rescue to play rugby. Together they contributed to a book about their experience, La Sociedad de la Nieve—The Snow Society. And in 2010, when thirty-three miners were trapped underground in Chile, four of the Andes survivors flew in from Uruguay to address the miners by video. “We’ve come to give them a little faith and hope,” Gustavo Servino said at the time. “To say we’re at their service if they need us for anything. And above all, to give support to the families outside.” After sixty-nine days, the first miner was lifted to the surface in a capsule while hundreds cheered. It took a full day, but all thirty-three miners were rescued and reunited with their loved ones. The tent city where everyone gathered above the mine was called Campamento Esperanza (Camp Hope).

Resilience is not just built in individuals. It is built among individuals—in our neighborhoods, schools, towns, and governments. When we build resilience together, we become stronger ourselves and form communities that can overcome obstacles and prevent adversity. Collective resilience requires more than just shared hope—it is also fueled by shared experiences, shared narratives, and shared power.

For my children and me, getting to know people who also lost a parent or a spouse has provided much-needed comfort. In most religions and cultures, traditions around mourning are communal; we come together to bury and remember those we have lost. At first, our house was filled with friends and family who made sure we had support around the clock. But eventually our loved ones needed to get back to their normal routines and we needed to find a new normal routine—and the loneliness hit hard.

In my second week of widowhood, I had put my kids to bed and was sitting alone in my kitchen when I flashed forward to an image I’d never thought of before: a much older version of myself sitting at that same table in front of a Scrabble board. But instead of Dave sitting across from me, I was staring at an empty chair. That week, my kids and I went to Kara, a local grief support center. Meeting other people who were farther along in the same journey helped us overcome permanence by showing us that we wouldn’t be stuck in the void of acute grief forever. “When we suffer loss or face difficulties of any kind, there is a real desire deep in most people for human connection,” explained Kara’s executive director Jim Santucci, who himself lost a child. “Support groups connect you with others who really get what you are going through. Deep human connection. It is not just ‘Oh, I feel bad for you’ but ‘I actually understand.’ ”

My kids also attended Experience Camps, a free weeklong program for children who have lost a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver. Two of the core values at the camp are building community and inspiring hope. In one exercise, kids went to stations to confront an emotion associated with grieving. For anger, kids used chalk to scrawl words that made them angry on the pavement. Some wrote “bullying”; others wrote “cancer” or “drugs.” Then on the count of three they threw water balloons on the ground to smear the words away and release their anger. At a second station, a camper held a brick representing guilt. As the brick became too heavy, another camper shared the burden of its weight. These exercises helped show my children that their emotions were normal and other kids felt them too.

To join a community after tragedy, we often have to accept our new—and often unwelcome—identity. Writer Allen Rucker told us that after he became paralyzed, “I initially didn’t want to hang around people who were in wheelchairs. I didn’t want to belong to that club. I saw myself as a freak; I didn’t want to join the freak fraternity.” His mind didn’t change overnight. “It took four or five years. It almost felt like every cell in my brain had to transfer, one at a time, very slowly learning to accept this thing.” As he made this personal adjustment, he grew closer to those who understood his situation. The bonus, he told us, was “these are some of the funniest people I have ever met because their humor is just as dark as possible.”

Allen’s point struck a deep chord within me. It took me a long time to say the word “widow,” and to this day it makes me wince. Still, I am a widow and accepting this identity allowed me to form new friendships. In the past two years, all of the new friends I’ve made have lived through tragedy. (The first time I wrote that sentence it said, “most have lived through tragedy,” but then I realized it was literally all of them.) The club that no one wants to belong to is incredibly bonding. Perhaps because none of us wanted to join, we cling to one another.

When Steven Czifra arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, he felt like an outsider—and not just because at thirty-eight he was twice as old as a typical freshman. Growing up, Steven suffered physical abuse and started smoking crack at age ten. Burglaries and carjacking led to stints in juvenile hall and then state prison. After fighting with another inmate and spitting on a guard, Steven was sent to solitary confinement for four years. He has since testified to the California State Legislature that isolation is a “torture chamber.”

After his release from prison, Steven entered a twelve-step program, completed his GED, and met his partner Sylvia. He discovered a love of English literature, and after several years at community college he was accepted to Berkeley. He’d earned his spot, but once he got to campus he felt different and disconnected. “I went to the English classes, but I didn’t really see myself in the faces of the people there,” he said. Then one day Steven was walking through the center for transfer students and was stopped by Danny Murillo, another student in his thirties, who said he instantly recognized Steven’s “demeanor.” Within a minute, they realized that they’d both spent time in solitary at Pelican Bay State Prison. “What happened in that moment,” Steven said, “is I saw myself as a student at Cal with every privilege and every right to be there.”

Steven and Danny became close friends and united to speak out against the cruelty of solitary confinement. They also helped start the Underground Scholars Initiative, a group that supports Berkeley students affected by incarceration. Having experienced the deepest desolation, they wanted to come together as a community. “As a collective of students, we wanted to put each other in the best possible position to succeed,” Danny told us. “A lot of times formerly incarcerated people don’t want to ask for help. We’re trying to get them to understand that it’s actually a sign of strength to recognize when you don’t have the skills to do something—and reach out for help. Wanting to improve is not a sign of weakness.”

The Posse Foundation is another organization founded on the importance of grouping students with similar backgrounds to combat feelings of isolation. Posse took its name from a remark made by a talented but lonely former student who observed, “If I only had my posse with me, I never would’ve dropped out.” Posse recruits underprivileged high schoolers who have demonstrated extraordinary academic and leadership potential and sends them in teams of ten to attend the same college on scholarship. Since 1989, Posse has helped nearly seven thousand students attend college with a 90 percent graduation rate. If we are serious about creating ladders of opportunity for everyone, we need to provide greater public and private support for long-term, intensive efforts like Posse.

Along with shared hope and experiences, shared narratives can build collective resilience. Narratives might sound “light”—how important can a story be?—but they are how we explain our past and set expectations for our future. Just as family stories help children feel a sense of belonging, collective stories create identity for communities. And stories that emphasize values like equality are critical for pursuing justice.

Shared stories are often created by rewriting old narratives and countering unfair stereotypes. In the United States and around the world, girls are often expected to be worse at math than boys. When college students were reminded of their gender before taking a math test, women performed 43 percent worse than men. When the exact same test was called a “problem-solving test” instead of a “math test,” the gender gap in performance vanished. In another experiment, black students scored lower than white students after being told that a test would assess their verbal ability, but when ability wasn’t mentioned, the race gap in performance disappeared.

Psychologists call this “stereotype threat”: the fear of being reduced to a negative stereotype. That fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when anxiety disrupts our thinking and causes us to conform to the stereotype. This effect undermines people of many races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds, and this is where the Posse Foundation rewrites the narrative. When Posse students arrive at college together, they create a different image on campus. In the words of one Posse alum, “The buzz around the school is that these Posse kids are cool and smart.” Instead of being threatened by negative stereotypes, they are lifted by positive ones.

I gained a new appreciation for communities forming to change narratives years before when I was writing Lean In. As I began talking to women about reaching for their ambitions, one common reaction was, “I want to lean in…but how?” Women have less access to the mentorship and sponsorship that are key to success in the workplace, but peer support can have a big impact. I teamed up with three women who were passionate about peer mentorship—Rachel Thomas, Gina Bianchini, and Debi Hemmeter—to launch Lean In Circles, small groups of peers who meet regularly to support and encourage one another. Today there are 32,000 Circles in 150 countries. More than half of all members report that their Circle helped them through a difficult time, and two-thirds say they are more likely to take on a new challenge after joining. I realize now that part of why Circles help women reach for their individual goals is because they build collective resilience.

The Millennial Latinas Circle in East Palo Alto connects older women and teenagers with a group goal of helping the young women—many of whom are teen mothers—get into and graduate from college. The Circle was founded by Guadalupe Valencia, who was forced to transfer to a different school after she became pregnant at sixteen. Many of the other adults in the group have personal and family histories of teen pregnancy too, and having seen its effects they are determined to write a new story for the next generation. “We all know what it is to live in a household where ‘college’ is a word that is not even said,” Guadalupe told me. “But for the Millennial Latinas, we are clear: College is not an option. College is a must.” Guadalupe has become a role model for the members: along with working full-time, she has followed her own mantra and gone back to school to finish her degree.

Often the people fighting injustice are themselves the victims of injustice. They have to find the hope and strength to overcome the adversity they face today in order to work for improvements tomorrow. From the end of apartheid to the development of vaccines, some of the world’s greatest achievements have been rooted in personal tragedies. By helping people cope with difficult circumstances and then take action to alter those circumstances, collective resilience can foster real social change.

Some hardships result from centuries-old discrimination—the steady accumulation of injustice that threatens to crush even the most resilient among us. Others hit unexpectedly. When sudden violence strikes, it can shake our faith in humanity to its core. In these moments, it’s hard to hold on to hope. Instead, we are justifiably filled with anger, frustration, and fear. That’s why I was riveted when I read a Facebook post by journalist Antoine Leiris, whose wife Hélène was killed in a 2015 Paris terrorist attack. Just two days later he wrote, “On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate….I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you.” He made a promise to defeat hate by not allowing it to affect his seventeen-month-old son: “We will play as we do every day, and all his life this little boy will defy you by being happy and free. Because you will not have his hate either.”

When I started reading Antoine’s post, I felt tremendous sorrow. But when I finished it, I was overcome by a tingling sensation in my chest and a lump in my throat. Adam told me there was a term for this (psychologists have a term for everything). “Moral elevation” describes the feeling of being uplifted by an act of uncommon goodness. Elevation brings out what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Even in the face of atrocity, elevation leads us to look at our similarities instead of our differences. We see the potential for good in others and gain hope that we can survive and rebuild. We become inspired to express compassion and battle injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

The month after Dave died, a white supremacist gunned down a senior pastor and eight parishioners during their Wednesday Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. I was reeling from my own loss, and seeing such senseless violence sank me deeper into despair.

Then I heard about the congregation’s response. That week, relatives of the victims went to court to address the gunman who had murdered their loved ones. One by one they rejected his hatred. “You took something very precious away from me,” said Nadine Collier, whose mother was killed. “I will never get to talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you, and have mercy on your soul….You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. If God forgives you, I forgive you.” Instead of being consumed by hatred, the church members chose forgiveness, which allowed them to come together and stand against racism and violence. Four days after the shooting, the church doors opened for regular Sunday service. Five days later, President Barack Obama spoke at the funeral of Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney and led the congregation in singing “Amazing Grace.”

“Mother Emanuel,” as the church is known, is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the South. Its congregations have endured laws forbidding black worship, a white mob burning down their building, and an earthquake. After every tragedy, they came together to rebuild, sometimes literally and always emotionally. As Reverend Joseph Darby, the presiding elder for a neighboring district, told us, “Their extension of grace is rooted in a long-standing coping mechanism passed down from people who had no option in many cases but to forgive and move on while still leaving the door open for justice to be done. It takes you past raw vengeance. Forgiveness clears your head to pursue justice.”

On the Sunday after the 2015 shooting, church bells around the city tolled at ten a.m. for nine minutes—one minute for each victim. “What unites us is stronger than what divides us,” pronounced Jermaine Watkins, a pastor from a local church. “To hatred, we say no way, not today. To racism, we say no way, not today. To division, we say no way, not today. To reconciliation, we say yes. To loss of hope, we say no way, not today. To a racial war, we say no way, not today….Charleston, together, we say no way, not today.” As the community began picking up the pieces, area churches started hosting conferences on preventing violence. After the FBI determined that a system breakdown had allowed the shooter to purchase a gun, families who had been affected by gun violence joined forces with church and political leaders to advocate for more rigorous background checks.

Social activism was not new to Charleston. Years before the shooting, religious leaders created the Charleston Area Justice Ministry—a network of twenty-seven faith-based congregations, including churches, synagogues, and a mosque. “Charleston did not have a tradition of houses of faith working together,” Reverend Darby reflected. “But some kind of divine serendipity kicked in. All of those people who would normally say ‘This is not going to work’ came to the table.” Since then, each year the ministry chooses one problem to tackle, proposes solutions, and addresses the issue at a large assembly where thousands of citizens come together with political and religious leaders. One of the justice ministry’s first accomplishments was convincing the school board to expand early childhood education by funding hundreds of additional preschool slots. Then they lobbied successfully to reduce juvenile incarceration and school suspensions. They were already helping disadvantaged communities, but after the shooting, the ministry’s focus turned to preventing racial profiling. “Before, they didn’t talk about race,” Reverend Darby told us. “But after the Emanuel tragedy a lightbulb went off in their heads. They realized they had to tackle race. It was fundamental to the challenges the community was facing.”

We can work to prevent violence and racism but many forms of adversity can’t be avoided. Loss. Accidental injury. Natural disasters. In 2010 alone, there were approximately four hundred natural disasters worldwide that claimed about 300,000 lives and affected millions. Some of the responses to these disasters show us that shared hope, experiences, and narratives can light the spark of collective resilience. But for the fire to be sustained we need shared power—the resources and authority to shape our own destiny.

Resilient communities have strong social ties—bonds between people, bridges between groups, and links to local leaders. I observed the importance of these local ties when I worked at the World Bank on leprosy eradication in India decades ago. Because of historic stigma, leprosy patients often fail to seek treatment, allowing their disease to progress and spread to others. When health workers visited villages to identify people with leprosy, they were rebuffed; the local people did not trust these outsiders, and women especially were reluctant to show spots on their skin to strangers. The health workers needed to find another approach. They convinced village leaders to run early detection programs themselves. The leaders held community meetings and recruited local nonprofits and citizens to perform plays showing that anyone coming forward with early symptoms would not be ostracized but would receive treatment and care.

This work made me acutely aware that even the most heroic examples of individual resilience can be inadequate in the face of poverty and untreated illness. When people with leprosy were kicked out of their villages, no amount of individual resilience could have helped them. It was not until the community began treating leprosy patients rather than banishing them that people could recover and survive.

Empowering communities builds collective resilience. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, psychologists went to refugee camps in Tanzania to provide mental health care. They found that treating individuals was less effective than strengthening the community’s ability to support vulnerable groups. The camps with the greatest resilience were organized like villages, with councils, meeting spaces for teenagers to hang out, soccer fields, entertainment venues, and places for worship. Instead of having outsiders in authority roles, the Rwandans led according to their cultural traditions. Self-organization provided order and built shared power.

Other times, collective resilience is needed to fight unjust cultural traditions. In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or “leftover women.” They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is “absolutely nothing until she is married.” One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school. More than 80,000 women have joined Lean In Circles in China, and they are working together to build shared power. One of the Circles created The Leftover Monologues, a play where fifteen women and three men take back the term “leftover” while also speaking out against homophobia and date rape.

Just a few months after Dave died, I met with twenty Circle members from across China. In an effort to keep as many commitments as I could, I traveled to Beijing to speak at the Tsinghua University business school commencement, bringing my parents and children with me. It was the first time I had spoken publicly since becoming a widow and I was still in a fog. But spending time with these brave women right before the speech lifted my spirits. I had met with the same group two years earlier and was eager to hear about the progress they’d made. They talked about the compassion they felt for one another and for themselves. They spoke of changing careers and insisting to their parents that they were going to find their own life partners in their own time. And they spoke of action they were taking together that they never would have dared to take alone. I felt that tingling sensation in my chest and that lump in my throat. It was the best possible reminder that being part of a community can give us strength that we sometimes can’t find on our own.

We find our humanity—our will to live and our ability to love—in our connections to one another. Just as individuals can find post-traumatic growth and become stronger, so can communities. You never know when your community will need to call on that strength, but you can be sure that someday it will.

When their plane crashed in the Andes, the rugby teammates had already built solidarity and trust. Early on they looked to the team captain for guidance. When he didn’t make it, they maintained confidence in one another. “We all have our own personal Andes,” Nando Parrado wrote long after the expedition with Roberto Canessa that led to their rescue. Canessa added, “One of the things that was destroyed when we crashed into the mountain was our connection to society. But our ties to one another grew stronger every day.”