Upper school students and faculty attended a screening of international children’s rights advocate Tom Nazario’s 2017 documentary “Living on a Dollar a Day” at today’s school assembly after sixth period.

Interact president Serena Lu (12) opened the event by introducing Nazario, the founder and president of philanthropic organization The Forgotten International.

“At the beginning of the year, Senor Olivas and Tom approached Interact to promote the screening for the premiere at the Los Gatos theater, so we helped out with that,” she said. “After that initial screening, Mr. Stoll and Senor Olivas talked a little more and organized with the administration to have this screened to the entire school.”

An adjunct assistant professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, Nazario has previously worked with the 14th Dalai Lama to bring to light the stories of Tibetan children living in China in his report “A Generation in Peril, The Lives of Tibetan Children Under Chinese Rule” and written various books on children’s rights.

Nazario then took the stage to speak about his recent visits to various private schools and screening his documentary to their students and faculty. He also discussed the U.N.’s Millennium Report, which lables global warming, nuclear proliferation and war, world health, protecting human rights and global poverty as five of the main problems facing the world today.

“I don’t think enough people, particularly people who live like us in the United States in a privileged environment, know about some of the people around the world who live on less than a dollar a day,” he said. “We travelled to 10 countries around the world in four continents and visiting people who live on so little—and we just talked to them about their lives, how they get by. What do they do? What are their dreams? What happens if someone in the family dies? That’s the kind of poverty about one in every seven people in the world live in every day.”

The documentary follows the lives of families living in the Volta Region of Ghana, the mountains of Bolivia, Peru, Cambodia’s Phnom Penh and India. To survive, parents and children work in tandem to herd animals, fish, collect recyclables and farm. Various statistics on international school attendance rates, spending and family income were interspersed between the documentary clips and photographs of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Renee C. Byer, who worked with Nazario to publish the 2014 book “Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor.”

After the screening, Spanish teacher Abel Olivas opened the floor to student and faculty questions. Various Interact and faculty members then joined Nazario for lunch in the Main conference room, where he talked about some of his personal experiences in visiting impoverished areas as well as ways that the local community can get involved.

“In Los Gatos, they teach a course in ‘Doing Good,’ where there’s a whole semester about gratitude and showing gratitude to different people,” Nazario said. “On leaving the class, they have a system where you throw whatever change you have in your pocket into a bucket and this non-profit, Rotary, matches that money gathered over the years to fund two children’s college educations. Through education and these documentaries, you can tell people about their stories. There are a lot of things you can do locally—they just take some time and energy.”

A copy of “Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor” is available to read in the library.

Gallery • 2 Photos

Kathy Fang

Students watch Nazario's documentary "Living on a Dollar a Day" during today's assembly. The piece was based upon Nazario's experiences chronicling the stories of various families living in poverty.