My UNICEF Story

First, the obligatory “May the fourth be with you.”

Now to the main event. It’s really two stories, 20 years apart. I’ll tell the first one here and the second one tomorrow; it relates to the first one.

The first story is about UNICEF.

My mother was a bit of a do-gooder, mainly in good ways. In the fall of 1959, she had an idea. In our town of Boissevain, population 1,200, she wanted the kids to forsake the traditional candy-seeking Halloween for one year and, instead, collect money for UNICEF. She contacted UNICEF and got the requisite number of UNICEF collection cartons. If I recall correctly—I was only 8 at the time—they looked like stunted orange and white milk cartons.

We were a moderate-income family: my father was the school principal, and my mother only occasionally made money by doing temp office work. But she used some of her money to buy an ad in the weekly Boissevain Recorder so that parents and candy-hander-outers would know what was coming. It was supposed to run the week before Halloween.

My mother wanted an either-or situation. She wanted kids to sacrifice that one Halloween year and collect money for UNICEF rather than any candy at all. I was alright with that for me, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with kids collecting both. Interestingly, though the kids who said anything about it to me were fine with her plan. You might respond that they were just telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. But if you think that, you’ve forgotten how kids are. The one kid who said something negative said he was quoting his parents.

Most of the adults around, though, were very outspoken against my mother’s idea. One of the lines I heard again and again was “Charity begins at home.” Indeed, our Sunday school superintendent, in his denunciation of the idea on the Sunday before Halloween, used that line in front of the all the Sunday school kids. He did that with my sister, brother, and me in the audience.

When the Boissevain Recorder came out, the publisher had somehow “lost” the ad. So it didn’t run. The main benefit was that my mother saved money. Word had gotten out quite widely and so virtually all the kids, parents, and potential donors knew about it.

The kids were supposed to meet at City Hall late on Halloween afternoon to get their milk cartons, er, collection boxes. That went seamlessly. Then they were to meet by about 8:30 p.m., by which time all the collection was to have occurred. That went seamlessly also. My mother put all the change into a big bag or box—I’ve forgotten which—and took it home. We had a fun evening. I got to stay up late as we counted all the money. It was a real bonding experience for my mum (that’s how we spelled it and pronounced it in Canada) and us three kids.

Two things were out of sorts, one little and one big.

The little one was that my mum told us that if anyone offered us candy, we were not to take it because it would make her look bad by giving potential critics a gotcha to use against her. I understood that and agreed with it, but I thought she should have persuaded us rather than dictating to us.

The big one was that 2 of our neighbor’s kids, whom we had always liked and got along with, broke into our garage, opening our car doors, and spread mud on the seats. My parents were upset, mainly hurt. I think they had a talk with the parents next door, but I don’t remember.

This next is part memory and part speculation. I think it was shortly after that that my mum told my dad she wanted to move and so my dad started interviewing for the job of principal in other towns. The baby boom was on and so it wasn’t hard for my dad to find a job. The next July, we moved to Carman and he was principal at a small school 7 miles away in a town called Graysville.

My main learning from this was twofold: (1) many kids wanted to be generous by giving up candy, that one time, to help kids in poor countries, and (2) people, including adults and the teenage kids next door, could be nasty. I’m still shocked at our Sunday school principal. I even remember his name but won’t bother to state it.

Since then, I’ve had a healthy skepticism about UNICEF and the UN in general. I didn’t have that skepticism when I was 8 years old.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell how reminiscing in 1979 about part of this story helped me connect with someone who didn’t like my political views and, after hearing the story, seemed more open.