Our youngest son Neal was a best man at tea founder Leigh Rawdon’s wedding. We became close friends with Leigh and her husband and helped perform the initial fundraising for tea as well as being an early investor. After Tea got going we asked her about the tagline – “little citizens of the world”. She surprised us by saying that she’d got it from us – we’d described our goal in raising our two sons as “citizens of the world.” To help inaugurate the blog, Leigh asked us to elaborate on how that happened.
Mark and Neal were born 22 months apart in Westminster Hospital, London, steps from the Houses of Parliament. But within 8 months of the appearance of the youngest we were on a plane to a 2-year assignment in California courtesy of Roger’s US multinational employer. We made the most of the stay, traveling with the boys in the Western USA and exchanging our annual free “compassion visits” home for tickets to Hawai’i. The boys got a very early look at a different culture to which they were born!
Returning back to the UK, Roger to a European marketing job and Cilla to teaching, we took the boys on as many overseas trips as we could and vacationed extensively in France. However, it was clear to us that opportunities for career development for ourselves and better futures for the boys lay in returning to the USA, and we arranged to move back in January 1982 to Silicon Valley.
We had long held a belief that the boys should be given the fullest exposure to other cultures, customs and environments. Cilla had been raised in Zambia and Kenya and Roger had lived in France and traveled extensively in Europe, South America and Asia. We wanted them to be comfortable in any geographical environment, both as a way of developing their persona and to enable them to fulfill their work aspirations.
Over our first eight years back in California Roger ran international sales & marketing for three computer industry companies. Our house was frequently full of visitors from Sweden to Indonesia, Japan to Brazil, and Cilla and the boys joined Roger on international trips whenever school and work permitted. Coupled with annual visits to family in the UK, from 6 years old through high school the international world was very much part of their lives, and air travel not a surprise. After high school both Mark and Neal traveled for a summer through Europe on Eurorail. Subsequent to university Mark spent time in Peru and Ecuador on ecology field trips, while after law school Neal spent two years in Holland working at the International War Crimes Tribunal. Today we have two sons completely unfazed at visiting different cultures, one working as a lawyer in the US Senate, the other completing a tropical biology PhD at Duke University while living with his fiancée in Finland and spending months each year in the Amazonian rain forest in Peru.
When we attempted to give our sons a “global” familiarity the communications infrastructure of 24-hour network news and the internet was not in place and it was hard for people to understand and see lives in other parts of the world. Today, even though in the USA we see other cultures and lives nightly on television there remains a lack of understanding of these cultures and arguably an insularity of approach. The only way for people to experience other cultures is to get in there and meet them. The younger you can make your children comfortable with other cultures the better!
