Lost and found in Africa

Malaria common thread as MP, wife save Sudanese girl, help to reunite her with siblings

By Susan Delacourt - Ottawa Bureau Chief

OTTAWA–For Glen Pearson, the Liberal MP for London North Centre, the fight against malaria is in his blood – literally.

Pearson, 55, who became an MP in a November by-election, doesn't talk much about it, but he has a life-long case of malaria; a tropical, parasitic disease he contracted doing aid work in Bangladesh in 1970 and which still attacks him three or four times each year.

Malaria also affects his six-year-old daughter, Abuk, who wasn't expected to live when Pearson and his wife, Jane Roy, 40, adopted her as a baby in war-ravaged Sudan about five years ago.

And in the next couple of weeks, with luck, Abuk, 6, will be reunited in her London home with twin sister Achen and eight-year-old brother Ater in a remarkable survival story of family lost and found in Africa.

At this very moment, Achen and Ater are in a Nairobi hospital getting a medical all-clear to come to Canada after enduring their own bouts of malaria and other diseases. Abuk is rearranging the furniture in the London home to accommodate a brother and sister that she didn't know she had until a couple of years ago.

Abuk's siblings are lucky, not just to be coming to Canada and joining the Pearson family, but to be alive at all. According to United Nations estimates, malaria is the largest single cause of death for African children under five years of age and more than one million children die of the disease every year. There's no vaccine and, though it can be treated, it is a recurring disease."

Today, Pearson will be on hand at Toronto City Hall, along with Mayor David Miller, MP Belinda Stronach and comedian Rick Mercer to kick off Africa Malaria Day. Collectively, they are trying to raise money to send anti-malarial bed nets to Africa, a remarkably low-tech, low-cost measure that could reduce malaria transmission by up to 50 per cent and child mortality by 20 per cent.

Each bed net costs just $10. But as the MP, firefighter and food-bank founder explains: "Ten dollars, it's not an exaggeration to say, it saves a life. It literally does that. But it does more than (save) one life. These are the kind of bed nets ... that can be put around a tent or whatever it is, so a mother can take her children under and provide protection."

This is no far-off, remote cause for Pearson. Over and above his own concern about Africa's suffering and his own adopted, malaria-survivor children, he suffers from the most virulent form the disease, subject to delirium and acute nausea whenever it attacks. His is actually a worse strain than those of Abuk or her siblings and it has proved debilitating at times in his pre-political life as a firefighter.

Pearson's last bout of malaria was in November, just before his by-election victory. Pearson recalled yesterday that he realized he was coming in for another malaria attack just as he was trying to do an interview with the Star last November at one of his campaign stops at the University of Western Ontario's business school. He was knocked flat for a few days afterward, but didn't let on publicly.

And this isn't the only remarkable aspect of Pearson's life that has slipped under the radar of a political capital obsessed with election timing and minority-Parliament bickering.

Pearson, most noticed so far for his introduction speech of Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion at the leadership convention last December, has been travelling back and forth from Sudan since 1998 – his most recent trip was in March, when he and his wife led a group of women from London to the area. Together with his wife, Jane, 40, they are the co-founders of Canadian Aid for southern Sudan (CASS), which is dedicated to building schools and businesses and "reintegrating" formers slaves and child soldiers from the region.

They first heard of Abuk when she was just four months old and her mother had died in militia violence in Sudan. Pearson and his wife conducted a year-long quest to find the tiny girl, always arriving in villages just after she had left with caregivers who were constantly on the move, fleeing the violence. Finally, they found her, just as they were leaving on a plane for Nairobi. Abuk was 15 months old and weighed just 12 pounds and no one gave her any hope of survival.

"But she responded to the care in the Nairobi hospital," Pearson said, and soon they were able to take her home and adopt her.

When Abuk was 4, the family decided she should see her homeland and they returned for a visit. To their shock and surprise, they were greeted at a Catholic mission by a young girl identical to Abuk – it was her twin sister, Achen. Then another surprise – a boy, two years older, also came forward. It was Ater, her half-brother. The two had been under the care of their grandmother, who graciously had decided that their best chance was to be reunited with Abuk and to be adopted by the Pearson family in Canada.

Now, nearly two years later, the paperwork and the health checks are nearly done and DNA tests have established that the children are indeed Abuk's siblings. (The father of the two girls was the slave owner who had abducted their mother and Ater at an early age. It's not known what happened to Ater's father.)

Pearson is a quiet man, who tells his amazing family stories with matter-of-fact declarations of passion. Malaria, he says, like his fervour to help the people of Sudan, will be coursing through his veins forever – or as he puts it: "Until I die."