Ian Hawkes and Erin Willmore
Meeting Scott Harman was like meeting one of those people you only hear about in magazine articles, but never expect to meet in real life. Just by looking at him, we would have never guessed he spent more than six years in solitary confinement. He even admitted himself that most people who know him, from church and work, don’t know anything about his past or his involvement in the community. For this reason, we decided to do an audio interview. We liked the idea that Scott is a sort of secret hero of the Provo and Orem community, who does not care if people don’t recognize him or even remember his name, and we felt that just having his voice and not any visuals would communicate this sort of faceless and noble service.
Scott’s humility was what was most impressive. He could not even say with great confidence that he was helping those people in the Addiction Recovery Program, but he said that he remembers looking up to his counselors and being strengthened by them, and he therefore hopes that he is helping others. This sort of noble service reminded me of Jared Jakin’s Documentary Ghosts on the Mountain. One thing that impressed me about Jared’s documentary, was that he was not trying to make a work of art for the purpose of causing social change, but he wanted to tell the story of underprivileged people and allow the audience to act for themselves. Scott’s benefit to the community is similar. He is not leading a grand campaign to help addicted individuals. He simply does his best to share his story, and stand as a living example to those who are heavily addicted to harmful substances that there is hope after addiction.
We feel that this piece of art can be helpful to the community as a whole. One thing that we found interesting was that Scott referred to the addiction recovery group as a ‘second family’, a microcosmic community in its own right. This is a community, which for many reasons, goes unnoticed and unappreciated by the larger community of Provo and Orem. Much like Adichie’s speech on ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, it became clear to us that many people in this community have a single story of addicted. Many think they are dangerous, while others think they are weak, or incapable, or simply hopeless. Scott’s story offers a second perspective. Though he is an ex-convict who served more than six years in solitary confinement, he is happily married to a BYU grad and just had his first child with her three months ago. His story is extremely important, not just to those people who are recovering from addiction, but also those who need to understand better how to interact with the addicted community, which is frankly all of us. As we move farther away from Datastan, Scott’s story is just another story that will be important to have in Storyland, helping us understand how to reach out to and strengthen the sub-community of addiction recovery groups which live within our community.
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