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Globe Trotting
Gaining a Deeper Sense of Family Through Travel
By Jenn Director Knudsen
And in Rwanda, a country so ravaged by war in 1994 that it's believed one million people died in 100 days of gruesome fighting, the foundation has paired the wives of the dead with the wives of the murderers to get small businesses – dairies and textiles – off the ground.
Sager says it's important that his children see him and his wife "walking the talk" – truly helping people in need, worldwide. "My kids don't have the advantage I had of growing up without a lot of money," Sager says. "I'm not against taking a trip for pleasure, but in the end, pleasure is derived from helping people who need it."
Dick Simon, of Newton, Mass., feels similarly about his kids' impressions of the lengthy adventures he's taken his family on. Simon and his wife, Patty, both 51, and their three children, Alex, 15, Katie, 13, and Ben, 11, have traveled extensively together since their first long (10-month) globe trot in 2000.
Simon, who works in real estate development and runs the Peace Action Network of both the Young Presidents Organization (www.ypo.org) and World Presidents Organization (www.wpo.org), is quick to acknowledge his children are lucky. "We're fortunate that our kids are growing up in certainly a very privileged existence, but it is also a very sheltered existence," Simon says.
This is part of the impetus behind exposing his family to those in the Third World on the opposite end of the privilege scale. As a result, all three of his children today are interested in fields like ecotourism, microcredit and education and community development abroad, Simon says.
Those interests were sparked from experiences like one in a small town outside Arusha, Tanzania, an eastern African country. There, the Simons toured Sakila Elementary School and learned each local family had to pay $350 for a child who graduates to attend a middle or junior high school. Without that kind of money – and the majority don't have it – parents must pull their kids out of the school once elementary education is completed and put them into the only alternative available: subsistence farming on family plots.
