For Patrick McGrann, the sky isn't his limit. It's his field of play, his diplomatic space. It's where he performs hand-to-hand acts of kindness and low-budget economic development for street kids in Kenya, rural kids in Burma (Myanmar) and, coming soon, orphans in a Darfur refugee camp.

Amid the sand, winds, and despair of Sudan, Mr. McGrann is poised to launch a unique effort in hope of rehabilitating traumatized children. He's going to tell these young people of Darfur to ... go fly a kite.

Actually, thousands of kites – all at the same time.

"Everything they've known in the skies has been bad," says McGrann. "Their skies have been filled with Sudanese bombers. Kites seem to be one of these disarming things."

Working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and SOS Children's Villages, the Austria-based aid organization, McGrann was set to leave his hometown of Minneapolis Nov. 6 to help stage the "Darfur Kite Festival." There, at the Oure Cassoni refugee camp, in a land where kiting is not a traditional pastime, McGrann plans to instruct children in kite construction and, then, kite flying.

With Universal Children's Day on Nov. 20 as his target, he wants as many as 3,500 kids to raise colorful nylon kites in unison toward those skies to set the world kite-flying record. "With kites, everyone becomes an optimist,'' he says.

If you're keeping score at home, the world kite mark hovers around 1,100, set by Scouts Australia last summer. But McGrann is no Kumbaya-singing Boy Scout, and Kitegang, his fledgling nonprofit organization, is no troop of Pollyanna-ish do-gooders.

His Kitegang plan is to create jobs and business skills in impoverished pockets of the globe by establishing kitemaking enterprises and, then, distributing many of those kites to children in need. Kitegang, he claims, will be the world's largest not-for-profit toy company. Already, the year-old Kitegang has trained postadolescent gang members in Nairobi, Kenya, to assemble kites.

"Patrick is an enthusiastic, energetic, entrepreneurial guy," says Margaret Zeigler, deputy director of the Congressional Hunger Center in Washington, D.C. McGrann held a fellowship with the center six years ago. "He picks up on things that, I think, a lot of people miss. When there's a problem to be solved, he addresses issues in his own way and has fun doing it."

War. Hunger. Disease. Corruption. Environmental devastation. Those scourges of the developing world ... how can anyone have "fun" with those? How can you put a kite in a kid's hands and claim some sort of psychosocial victory when it's a meal or shelter she truly needs? Isn't Kitegang frivolous?

"Most people that pose that question – ... very honestly – don't have the experience that I have," McGrann counters in a recent interview here. "There are groups that are already there in Darfur, filling medical and food needs, doing so many great things. But, tell me, what happens when you hear, 'Darfur'? Let's see, I'll skip to the next article. You know it's going to be bad news.... Who wants to watch them getting a vaccination? Who wants to see another food line? That's a downer. Instead, see some kids having a good time in the worst, most miserable place on Earth, and, if we do set the [kiting] world record, well, that's surely a different spin on Darfur."

He pauses his rapid-fire self-defense, then adds, "This is what I can do. People who ask, 'Why kites?', well, they must have more money than I do. Why don't they do something?"

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