A Letter to My Sons

Dear Alexandre, Dear Sam,

Today is international Children’s Day. Sorry to celebrate by leaving you at 5 o’clock in the morning. November 20 was chosen as Children’s Day because, as best I can recall, it’s the date the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into effect back in 1989 at the United Nations in New York. Basically, the Convention is a document – a statement, a list of things ordinary people and governments should do – to make sure that children around the world live lives that are filled with love and everything they need to make them safe and happy. There are other days throughout the year that are meant to celebrate things or to make people aware of what the world is like. For example, yesterday was World Toilet Day, which sounds rather funny until you realize that 2.6 billion people – more than a third of all people on the planet – do not have access to the kinds of toilets we have.

I left you this morning with a heavy heart. Most of the time I go on these trips, your mother drives me to the airport with you in the backseat, you jump out of the car once we’re parked and hug me with an intensity that will last for the two weeks I will be away, then I’m off. This time it was harder to say goodbye as you lay in bed, you Alex, still half asleep, and you Sam, who’d been patiently waiting to hug me. Your whispers of I love you betrayed a sadness that I felt as much as you.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to say goodbye. I think it’s just over 50 in the past nine years. Both of you have only known a father who travels to far off places to do stuff which is always hard for me to explain to you. Maybe now’s the time to try.

We live in a world where your mother and I, like just about any parent, want to protect you from what’s really out there. We did what we could to prevent you from hearing the f-word and the s-word, and while you may have said it yourselves once or twice, you know it’s wrong to do so. Thankfully, you still think that moron, idiot, and hate are bad words, and when it comes down to it, you’re right. You’re each at a point in your lives when you’ve been bullied by unkind, unloved children, and your mother and I are trying to teach you to stand up for yourselves. Otherwise your gentle natures make you easy targets to be pushed around.

The world as I know it is a lot nastier than seen through your eyes, and believe me when I say that I want it to stay that way. I want you to grow up in a better world than the one we live in now. I want you to live in a world where your children will not be bullied in the schoolyard for no reason. I want you to live in a world where your children’s friends won’t be hurt or insulted because they’re of a different colour, or a different religion, or because they’re a different anything, because “different” isn’t wrong. I want you to live in a world where you don’t see people living on the street, as you did Sam when we walked downtown together a few months ago. I want you to live in a world where the news on TV and the internet is about people helping each other, not fighting against each other.

There are a lot of bad things happening in the world today, Alex and Sam, and when I travel to places I’d never heard about when I was your age it’s because I am working with people in these countries who want to make the world a better place. Some of the people I see teach children your age that they have these things called “rights.”

Everyone has rights, or at least everyone is supposed to have rights. Everyone should have the right to go to school, to have an education. There are millions of children your age around the world who have never attended school, nor will they ever go. When I lived in Africa, I saw a lot of children like that, spending their days doing nothing, or helping with chores around the house, or walking for hours to fetch a bucket of dirty water. They could go to school, but their parents cannot afford it, or maybe there are no schools, or maybe the parents don’t realize how important an education really is.

There are lots of other rights. People have the right to be as healthy as possible, and that means having enough doctors and nurses take care of you when you are sick, and to make sure there is enough medicine to get better. Remember when you broke your arm, Alex? We had to wait at the hospital for a long, long time but we had a lot of people take care of you and you got better in no time. And Sam, remember when I was in Nepal and you were with Mommy and Alex and you went into a seizure? The fire fighters came to our house their truck in minutes and they made sure you were OK. A lot of people don’t have the assurance that someone will help them when they need help the most.

So the people I see when I am on my trips help people to understand that they have these rights and so many other kinds of rights, like the right to have a job, the right to marry, the right to say what you want. And yes, there is even the right to rest (but that does not mean you rest all the time. Sometimes you do have to clean your rooms and do your homework). When I work with these people in different countries, we talk about the ways in which we can make sure people have these rights. That means we talk about our values – the ways of living that help define us. We – everybody on the planet – have some common values, even though it may not look that way. I think deep down we all want to be good to each other, we all want to live in peace, we all want to respect each other, we all want to cherish life. These are all things that the people I work with believe in.

The truth of the matter is, there are not enough people in this world who are willing to change it for the better. The people I will meet in Sri Lanka are some of those people who are making a difference in the lives of those less fortunate than us. So it’s important to encourage them in the work they do and to help them as much as possible. That’s what I try to do with my work. I’m what you would call a “facilitator,” which means I help bring these people together to talk about their work and to find ways to make their work better. They make my work better as well, because I learn from them. And it’s not just my friends in Sri Lanka, but it’s from others like them all over the world. Remember all the times I’ve been to Indonesia, or to places like Jordan, or Iraq, or Lebanon, or all those places in Africa? Everywhere I go, there are people I meet who work hard to make sure the people around them have their rights.

I’m not saying all this as an excuse for my absence from your lives over the years. I’ve been away far too often from you, living in hotels and guest houses, from really fancy ones to the kind where I wage war against cockroaches every night. Last time I counted, the number of days I’ve been away from you with this job added up to more than one year. I’m saying all this to you in the hopes that you’ll understand what I do a little more, and that you’ll be thankful for the wonderful lives you have, and somehow do your part to make this world a better place for everyone.