BUILDING RAINBOW NATIONS

SEVEN YEARS AGO, I took my sons Henry and Patrick to South Africa to check out some new charitable project requests for the Utopia Foundation and to review some projects we were already supporting.

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Utopia's mission is to create a world where every person goes to bed feeling safe, fed, happy, and optimistic about tomorrow. The emphasis is on communities and transformative education, and our process is centered on humbly asking what people need, being as local as possible, and having conversations on how we can love the community without judging it.

In other words, we come to listen, and the intentional bias that guides us is to listen primarily to mothers and grandmothers. We do it because it works, and also because I was raised by a feminist who taught women's studies and a dad who made sure we learned to listen with curiosity, intention, and acceptance because he did not wish to raise any bigots. The result of the process on that visit to South Africa is that we purposefully interacted with a lot of different people in many different situations. When we returned home to Uganda, my wife asked how it went, and I replied, “We should live in South Africa.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because no one there asked me if Patrick is my son,” I told her.

My answer has to do with what people pay attention to—something I notice because I have six kids from four DNA pools. What's obvious to everyone is that, like most kids born in Zambia, Patrick’s eyes are brown and his skin is black. His younger brother Henry has DNA more akin to a Scotch-Irish guy: blue eyes, curly blond hair, and skin that burns easily. In Uganda, and also in the United States and many other countries, I get lots of looks and questions about my kids, and it does not feel good to hear people say, “He can't be your son,” or “That's not your son.”