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As published in the Hamilton Spectator
April 4, 2009
Photos and article by Steve Buist, The Hamilton Spectator
Former NHL goalie Dave Dryden works to keep his father's dream alive: supporting kids in developing countries so they can pursue their goals; 'THERE IS NOTHING more beautiful and peaceful than a sleeping child.' Those are the words of Murray Dryden, and they're the starting point for his charity.
Special Report
PUNE, India (Apr 4, 2009)
The lean, lanky frame is hunched over the camera. The man peers through the viewfinder. Then he straightens and yells "OK." Three skinny, shoeless children -- sitting ramrod straight on overturned plastic buckets, hands on knees just so -- break into shy grins and yell "OK" right back at him.
The shutter clicks. The man smiles. He gives the kids a thumbs-up.
"That was awesome," he tells the kids, and you can just tell he really means it.
Hour after hour in the broiling midday sun, the man stands patiently over his camera, snapping pictures of the endless parade of children.
Just the way his dad used to do it.
That part is key, you learn quickly.
It has to be the way Dad did it.
You look a little more closely at the man behind the camera.
That face, you think to yourself. There's a familiarity in his face that's instantly recognizable to a sports fan.
The last name is certainly unmistakable. He's a Dryden, that's for sure.
But no, despite the resemblance, the man leaning into the camera isn't Ken, the better-known Dryden, the nimble goalie-turned-celebrated-author-turned-Liberal MP.
It's older brother Dave, also a former NHL goalie -- lesser known, to be sure, yet with a hockey career just as interesting as that of his famous brother.
Born in Hamilton, Dave kicked around the NHL and WHA for 13 seasons during the '60s and '70s with Chicago, Buffalo and Edmonton, playing with and against hockey's all-time greats -- from Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull to Wayne Gretzky.
Now, here he stands, slowly baking in a dusty schoolyard in this dusty Indian village north of Pune -- where life has changed little from a century ago, maybe five centuries ago -- doing his part to keep alive the dream of his father, Murray.
In 1970, Murray Dryden created Sleeping Children Around The World, a Canadian charity that has developed an impeccable reputation built on Murray's rigid, old-school belief that every cent of every dollar donated must go directly to children.
Each $35 donation gives a child in a developing country a bedkit, consisting of items such as a bedroll, pillow, blanket, school uniform, shoes, school supplies, mosquito net and backpack.
The items are purchased from suppliers in the host country, so there's a spinoff benefit as well for the local economy.
Not a penny of donated money is spent on advertising or administration, and every person who makes a donation to Sleeping Children is sent a picture of the actual child who received a bedkit because of their generosity.
This year, Sleeping Children Around The World will distribute its one millionth bedkit since Murray handed out the first 50 at an orphanage in Pune 39 years ago.
In February, to celebrate the achievement, Dave Dryden and 12 members of the extended Dryden family went to Pune, where Sleeping Children got its start, to take part in a special bedkit distribution to honour the legacy of Murray, who died in 2004 at the age of 92.
It's 6 a.m., and the haunting sound of the Muslim call to prayer washes down on the neighbourhood from loudspeakers above.
I've already been awake for a couple of hours, staring at the ceiling.
My bed at the Pune YMCA is rock hard -- and the pillow is even harder, if that's possible.
The room is clean, if spartan, but the overpowering smell of mothballs is driving me crazy. They're everywhere -- in cupboards and drawers, scattered in the sink like gumballs.
Like all volunteers who take part in distributions with Sleeping Children Around The World, I've paid for this privilege out of my own pocket.
It's another one of Murray's rules. Not a cent of travel costs is picked up by the charity. That doesn't seem to be a deterrent, however. There's now a three-year waiting list for volunteers who want to hand out bedkits to waiting children.
"The harder we make it, the more volunteers we get," said Dave Dryden, who has taken over as the charity's president and chairman.
Donors to Sleeping Children receive a charitable tax receipt but travel costs for volunteers to go on a distribution are not eligible for a tax receipt.
"That was one of Dad's big things," Dryden said. "He didn't want to do anything on the back of government.
"After Dad passed away, I had about six or seven guys come up to me and say, 'Dave, you're going to change that now, aren't you?' And I said, 'No friggin' way.'"
That's about as strong as the language gets for Dryden, with maybe the occasional gusts up to "Oh jiggers" when he's riled.
He's a gentleman, a throwback to a time when performing fairly and honourably were as important to athletes as winning and losing.
Take his first NHL game, for example, back on Feb. 3, 1962, when he was still a junior with the Toronto Marlies.
Teams didn't carry backup goalies in those days, so the Toronto Maple Leafs would stick one of their junior goalies in the stands at Maple Leaf Gardens and he'd be available for either team to use in case of injury.
It was Dryden's turn that Saturday night when the New York Rangers came to town, and sure enough, doesn't Ranger goalie Gump Worsley go down with a bad back at the start of the second period.
Dryden is summoned from the stands, sprints to the Marlies dressing room, straps on his pads and squeezes into the Gumper's tiny jersey.
Then he heads onto the ice to do his best against the very team that held his NHL rights, with never a doubt that he'd be expected to give his all against his parent club.
It's such an archaic concept that it seems quaint now.
He got a hundred bucks from the Rangers, too, for his efforts. Then he learned that the $100 made him a pro in the eyes of the NCAA, so he was ineligible to pursue a hockey scholarship to an American university.
Dryden even told the NCAA he'd give the money back "but it didn't make any difference," he added. "They said, 'You played in the game and whether you took any money or not, you're done.'"
It's 7 a.m. and just turning light as we pile into three vehicles -- a baker's dozen of Dryden family members and me.
The air is still refreshingly cool but that won't last long. By midday, the temperature will be nudging 34 C. Seven days spent in India and I didn't see a single cloud the entire time I was there.
The dry season is in full swing and there won't be any significant rainfall now until the monsoons arrive in late June.
Five distributions have been set up over six days, all of them in small, remote villages north of Pune and to the east of Mumbai.
The destinations don't exactly roll off my tongue. We'll distribute 571 bedkits in Gunjalwadi Pathar, for example, another 622 in Modhalavadi, and 568 in Javalebaleshwar.
Our distribution days are long and exhausting. We're up at 6 a.m., then a quick breakfast before heading out at 7 a.m. for a drive that will take at least three hours.
After a day spent in the sun and heat, it's back into the cars for another three hours or more, arriving in darkness at the YMCA, sometimes as late as 8 p.m.
On this day, we're heading to Sarole Pathar, which lies north of Pune in the hardscrabble hills already burned gold by the unblinking sun.
Even though it's only 120 kilometres to Sarole Pathar, it's a journey that will take about three hours because of the chaotic state of Indian roadways.
The first 45 minutes or so are spent just trying to escape Pune, a city of nearly five million people, with another two million people living in the slums and crumbling buildings that crowd around the city's fringes.
The contrasts between extreme poverty and wealth are disturbing. Tiny shacks stitched together with corrugated sheet metal and tarps stand right beside a Mercedes-Benz dealership in a gleaming new glass building.
It takes only a few minutes in India to realize the enormity of the challenge facing charities such as Sleeping Children.
"The question we struggle with is how poor is poor?" Dryden said.
It's a question that gnaws at Indians themselves, like the members of the Rotary Club of Pune -- many of them well off by Indian standards -- who are helping with the distributions.
"There's a massive dichotomy in India between the well-to-do and the poor," said Nitin Shah, a dentist and a past president of the Pune Rotarians. He's using a week of his vacation time to assist the Sleeping Children team.
"The problem is that sometimes you're helpless," Shah said. "Whatever we do is a drop in the ocean. There are just so many people.
"They don't have basic amenities," he added. "They've never heard of plumbing. They don't have electricity half the time."
As we drive into the small village, a handful of young boys are playing cricket in a rocky field with a rubber ball, but they abandon their game and run behind us as our string of cars pulls up to the schoolyard.
This is a big day for the village of Sarole Pathar, and there's a festival-like atmosphere.
For some here, it will be the biggest event they'll witness in a lifetime. Many of those gathered are seeing people with white skin for the first time, Shah said.
More than a thousand people are already waiting for us as a procession of children banging drums and cymbals leads us into a courtyard at the school.
There is a clear separation between the men and women at each distribution.
The men stand or squat on one side of the courtyard, most in white shirts and the traditional white caps that are common in rural India.
On the other side of the courtyard, women sit together, crosslegged on the ground in brightly-coloured saris.
Some of the children attending this distribution left their homes at dawn and walked for a couple of hours over distances of up to nine kilometres.
In the courtyard, about 600 children are also sitting crosslegged on the ground, many of them shoeless.
They sit in straight lines, waiting patiently, some for hours at a time until their group gets called.
The children first put on their new school uniforms, then line up to have their pictures taken by Dryden.
Next, they get fitted with shoes -- for many, the prized possession of all the items in the kit. Finally, they receive a large bag of bedding and school supplies, a backpack and a ballcap. The littlest children have a difficult time just lifting the bag off the ground.
Then it's into the waiting arms of their parents, many of whom are wearing broad smiles.
On the front porch of one house, a family of four with a child who received a bedkit is resting in the shade.
A man who could speak a little English told me the family lived three kilometres away and they were preparing to walk home in the midday heat.
"Don't worry, they're strong," the interpreter said with a smile. "The strongest."
Visiting a village such as Sarole Pathar is like stepping back in time to a way of life not much different than what would have existed a couple of centuries ago.
There's no running water, no indoor plumbing, and women collect water from communal wells in jugs that they carry atop their head.
Some of the small houses have a cow or a goat tied up out front, and often, next to the house, cow dung has been pounded into circles and left to dry. The flat cakes are stacked and used as fuel for cooking fires.
There's not a single shop in the village, and the closest market is more than 10 kilometres away.
Many of the houses have enough electricity to power a couple of light bulbs, maybe even a television. But there are no refrigerators and food is stored dry.
A couple of doors down from the school lives eight-year-old Rahul Ghule, who has just received a bedkit.
Rahul's parents invite me into their home, which consists of one room, about the size of a master bedroom in a typical suburban Hamilton house. Four people live in the room: Rahul, his younger brother and his two parents.
There's one bed near the front door for the parents, while Rahul and his brother sleep on the hard-packed dirt floor. In one corner, there's a small pit where Rahul's mother cooks meals over a wood fire.
Like most men in the village, Rahul's father works in the fields as a farm labourer, but there's little work during the dry season, when nothing grows.
A wall that stands about shoulder high separates the Ghules' half of the house from a similar-sized room on the other side of the wall.
I walk up to the wall and look over it - Rahul's aunt, uncle and their family live in the other half of the house. Rahul's father and his uncle each own half of the house.
Each room has a separate front door, but other than that and the short wall down the middle, there's no other privacy between the two families.
"How old are Rahul's parents?" I ask. The young man acting as my impromptu interpreter relays the question.
They don't know how old they are, he tells me. Rahul's father is about 35 and his mother is about 30, they guess.
The interpreter also tells me that Rahul is very happy he received the kit.
Come to think of it, I realize, most of the people I've seen as I wandered through the villages seem happy. In fact, despite their lack of material possessions, they seem as happy -- maybe happier -- than many of the people I work with back home.
I'm not sure why I was surprised by that.
"We are a very satisfied lot," Nitin Shah tells me with a smile. "We tend to forget unhappiness fast."
"There is nothing more beautiful and peaceful than a sleeping child." Those are the words of Murray Dryden, and they're the starting point for his charity.
Murray was trying to survive as a travelling salesman during the Depression, eventually landing on Haddon Avenue North in Hamilton's west end, near McMaster University. Both Dave and Ken were born in Hamilton.
"He had a lot of nights sleeping on the floor in train stations," said Dave. "He knew how important it was to have a good night's sleep."
It's safe to say that Murray marched to the beat of a different drummer.
"I can remember as a kid, invariably kids want to do something and their parents say no, and you'd say, 'Well, everyone else is doing it,'" Ken said from his Parliament Hill office. "He had this response that you never had an answer for. He'd say, 'You don't want to be like everyone else, do you?'
"That was Dad."
When the family moved to Etobicoke, he paved the backyard so the boys and their friends had a place to play ball hockey. As a salesman, he pushed all sorts of wacky products, many of which eventually ended up littering the floor of the garage.
"You'd listen to him talk about these things and you'd think it was a greater invention than the Model T Ford," Ken said. "There were all kinds of these things where the ship never came in."
Murray also considered himself to be a good photographer. One night, he snapped a picture of daughter Judy while she was asleep, and he was struck by how peaceful she looked. He began to wonder if children around the world looked just as peaceful when they slept.
"Dad was a great traveller," Dave said. "Back in the days when people didn't travel around the world, Dad was doing it."
The story is that Murray was walking down a street one night in Lahore, Pakistan, when he tripped over something. He stooped down to pick it up and discovered it was a child, who ran away.
"He got so upset that when he came back to Canada, he thought, 'Every kid has to have a good night's sleep,'" Dave said.
And the idea of the bedkit was born.
"Then he thought if you're going to give a bedkit to a kid, why don't you confirm that to whoever gives the money by taking a picture of that child sleeping, because that will just show what a great thing a bedkit is," Dave said.
Murray eventually sold three Christmas tree farms he owned, donated the family home in Etobicoke to the charity and used the $3.8 million in proceeds to set up a trust fund that pays any expenses associated with Sleeping Children, including the salary of the charity's one and only office worker.
"Being able to have 100 per cent of their donations go to cause-related activities is admirable," said Marnie Grona, spokesperson for Imagine Canada, a national umbrella group that provides support for charities and nonprofit organizations. "They'd be one of the few in Canada to do that."
The first distribution of 50 bedkits took place on Aug. 17, 1970, at St. Crispin's orphanage in Pune, and Murray was determined to get a picture of each child sleeping.
The experience turned into a comical near-disaster, however.
The children were so excited that they couldn't sleep. For many of them, it was their first bed.
In one of his books, Murray described working in the wee hours of the morning trying to take pictures of each sleeping girl by oil lamps and flashlights, hampered by the heat and mosquitoes.
Soon after, he decided to just take pictures of the children with their bedkits.
In the early days, Murray did the distributions on his own, lugging his camera equipment halfway around the world.
When the charity grew to the point that he couldn't do it all himself, Murray insisted his rigid rules be followed.
"There had to be three kids in the picture, three bedkits in the picture, he's even got it that you have to stand 11 feet away when you're taking the picture," said Dave.
"You try to put local colour in the background," he added. "I mean, we've had donkeys, we've had cattle. You bring them in and set them in the background.
"Everybody in the organization in those days was terrified of coming home and showing Dad their pictures because he was so tough," Dave said with a chuckle.
"People would come back and get totally chewed out. Dad would grade the pictures, you know, A+ and a B-, that sort of stuff. But it was with the belief that this was the best way to validate to a donor that a child did get a bedkit."
There was one letter from a donor that confirmed for Murray the value of the children's pictures.
"Do you know what it is like to give for years never knowing for sure what your money is doing?" the letter said. "Then for the first time getting a picture to show you? I had to blink away the tears. Many, many thanks for taking the time to send me pictures."
Now it all makes sense.
Now you understand why the children must sit just so for their pictures, why the bedkit must be spread out just right, why the man at the camera agonizes over the photos despite the blazing sun.
"Hope for many who have none."
That's the motto of St. Crispin's orphanage in Pune, where more than 300 girls live permanently and another 400 arrive daily to attend school.
We pull into the parking lot and for Dave Dryden, the circle is complete.
Thirty-nine years ago, Sleeping Children started here with 50 bedkits, and now, Dryden is walking the halls of the orphanage for the first time.
Leading the Dryden family on a tour is Tichnor Charles, St. Crispin's CEO.
"Some are orphans, some are destitute," Charles says matter-of-factly as we walk past classrooms. "Their parents are in prison or HIV-positive."
There are six dorm rooms that each hold about 50 girls. There are no beds. The girls sleep on thick blankets spread on the hard floor. Each girl has one small scuffed suitcase to hold all of her worldly possessions, and the cases are stacked on shelves along one wall of the dormitory.
About 1,200 meals are made here each day, and the girls help with the preparation.
Those who go to school at St. Crispin's but don't board there also receive a meal, which in itself is an incentive for the girls to attend school.
"All these kids live in slums," said Charles. "Their parents probably live in a tin shed eight-by-eight or maybe 10-by-10."
Along with the original distribution in 1970, Sleeping Children returned to St. Crispin's to hand out kits in 1983 and 1995.
Today, there's a surprise waiting for Dryden in a third-floor reception area.
He doesn't know that the local Rotarians have gathered together about two dozen women who had received bedkits at the past St. Crispin's distributions.
One of the women is Delphine Lobow, now 43 years old. She received a kit in 1983 and still has one of the blankets.
Another is Mangla Babu Shaikh, 21, who received a kit in 1995 when she was eight years old. Originally from Mumbai, she was brought to St. Crispin's by people from her father's company after he died.
And there is Salbha Nikalje, who was eight years old when she received a kit in 1983. She ended up at St. Crispin's after both her parents died.
She eventually became a nurse and then a Christian evangelist.
Of the women gathered, the most poignant story belongs to Shashikala Dasar, now 57.
She was one of the original 50 girls in 1970 to receive a Sleeping Children bedkit.
She arrived at St. Crispin's in 1961. Her father had died and her mother wasn't able to take care of all her children.
In a touching twist, Dasar went on to become headmistress of the St. Crispin's school and her mother now lives with her in a house on the orphanage's property.
Thirty-nine years later, Dasar still remembers the day Murray Dryden arrived with his bedkits.
"It made us feel special," she tells me.
Murray understood that about Sleeping Children.
"He understood a few basic things," said his son, Ken. "People like to give. They like to feel good about themselves.
"The best way to feel like a giver is giving to a person," Ken added. "He knew that they wanted to see who they were giving to, they wanted to know exactly what went to that person, and they wanted to know that their money wasn't being eaten away little by little in other costs."
Dave's first distribution with Sleeping Children took place in India in 1994, a trip he remembers well.
"You'd look at children who were in such extreme poverty and think they must be sad and realize no, a kid's natural thing is to be happy," said Dave. "What makes me most emotional is the positive nature of the human spirit. Regardless of the conditions, it tends to bring out the best in people in most cases.
"I could really see Dad's point that it just isn't fair," Dave added. "I came back understanding why Dad got so passionate about it."
He also came back with questions and a need for answers.
"What about the bedkit?" he asked himself. "Is that our impression of what a child needs or is it what the child really needs? Is it the right thing that we are doing?"
Look, Dryden admitted, let's not kid ourselves. An impoverished country like India faces a wide range of problems -- hunger, disease, poverty, lack of clean water, environmental horrors of all types and sizes.
There is no one solution, and Sleeping Children Around The World doesn't pretend, or intend, to fix all of the problems by handing out bedkits.
In fact, Dryden said, he'd be delighted to share ideas with other charities that adopt different approaches to poverty.
Sleeping Children has embraced the bedkit as one small step forward, and Dryden has become a convert.
"I didn't think personally that bedkits would be the key," Dave admitted. "I'm coming more and more to believe that yeah, it does start with a good night's sleep.
"I'm becoming more and more of the belief that we are making an impact and that it's not just a paternalistic we-know-what's-best-for-you attitude."
Murray was a great storyteller, both Dave and Ken agree, and his travels with Sleeping Children provided many of the stories he told his family. He was 86 years old when he went on his final distribution trip to India.
"It was one of those great mutual experiences," said Ken. "Dad was great for Sleeping Children and Sleeping Children was great for Dad.
"He was a believer, he believed in whatever he did," Ken said. "He was a salesman and when you're a salesman you have to be a believer, and what he was selling was not only the best around but the best that ever was.
"With Sleeping Children, he found the purpose of his life after he retired," Ken added. "He never would have lived to 92 if it wasn't for Sleeping Children. He couldn't wait to get out to the next Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club or school to spread the word.
"It's a storyteller's charity."
sbuist@thespec.com
905-526-3226
