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Globe Trotting
Gaining a Deeper Sense of Family Through Travel
By Jenn Director Knudsen
For most families, sharing a bathroom with 40 Tibetan monks is no idea of a vacation. Guess you've never met the Sager family – and others of their ilk – for whom extended family travel is more about the real world than versions of it found at resorts.
Families tend to return from such trips with a yearning to make a difference in the communities they visited and the desire to embark on lengthy travel again and again. They also gain a deeper sense of family. "We overcome things – being cold in a hut in a village in the middle of winter," Bobby Sager, 51, says. "You develop an ability to adapt to people, to food, to situations, to life."
Sager, wife Elaine, 50, and their two children, Tess, 14, and Shane, 11, had taken month-long trips together before September 2000. But it was in that month the family left its Boston home and didn't return to it until July 2001.
In those 11 months, the Sagers visited some of the poorest of Third World nations: Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Pakistan. They went not to ogle the horrid conditions in which many people in those countries eke out a life, but to develop programs for them "and make our hands-on impact," Sager says.
Sager says his family's personal mission mirrors that of the foundation he founded and for which his wife works, the Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Road Show: "Being eyeball to eyeball with the people you're trying to help."
In Nepal, where he serves as consul general to its government, a monarchy, Sager says his foundation helps develop trade. In Dharamsala, Tibet, where he and his family share a toilet with myriad monks and sleep – on the floor – in others' sparse homes, his foundation is spearheading efforts to teach the locals chemistry, biology and genetics.
