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| Patrick McGrann works with children in Abéché, Chad, near the Darfur region, and hopes to set the world kite record there,
with up to 4,000 kids in a refugee camp flying kites in unison. Courtesy of Kitegang |
A 'kite runner' says it's OK to have fun in Darfur
Patrick McGrann wants to help refugee children take back their skies, create jobs for the needy, and maybe even set a world record at the 'Darfur Kite Festival.'
By Jay Weiner | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 7, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 3
Minneapolis - 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."
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