Thanks.
You're right, the ball is rolling, and I hope we can keep up with it. We've been pushing this thing for the last five years. Now it's starting to roll, and that's good news. This is not about empire-building on our behalf. If we got everybody in the country to know about this, we'd shut our doors. It's like finding the cure for whatever it is your charitable cause is for, if you know what I mean.
We are carrying on with our pin campaign, and we'd probably reflect that to the greatest degree, because it's something that people can do without having to travel. It's something that adults can do very simply as a sign of respect and pride—and as I say, it's ubiquitous, from sea to sea.
There are other opportunities, as Dave mentioned, for adults to travel. We are spending a great deal of money right now on revamping our website. One of the things we plan on doing is facilitating...because we're not in the travel business. Our students who win the Beaverbrook prize go over, but we leave the student travel business to the pros for large groups and so forth.
That said, often adults don't know where to start. We're going to build in a section on our website so that if it's your wish to go to Vimy, we'll suggest some sites you should take in--Juno Beach, Passchendaele, and so forth--and give you the travel times and so on and so forth. We'll try to simplify planning for people who are keen.
Just briefly, I want to say that I was over there this year in June. One of the participants on this trip, among a group of adults in this fundraising endeavour, asked our executive director if she could find this woman's great-grandfather's grave. Our executive director, who lives in Douai, is expert at this. She found it on her iPhone within moments and drove to the grave. There are dozens of gravesites all maintained by the Commonwealth graves commission. She took a photograph of the grave and e-mailed it home to the individual.
This woman said that within half an hour of having made the request, which was just good luck, she saw her great-grandfather's grave. It was the first time anyone in her family had seen it. Then she asked her executive director if she could show her where the grave was so that she could make a visit. Without her knowledge, the executive director arranged for the entire group to go. We hired a piper, and when the woman saw the piper waiting in the field, she turned to us and said, “He can't start playing, because I'm going to start to cry.”
This was her great-grandfather, a man she'd obviously never met because he died there. We held off on the piper.
She brought out a newspaper article about her great-grandfather who left behind a widow with three children. The children lived in abject poverty as a result of his death in France. That's not atypical. That is what happened to many, many Canadian families as a result of the loss of the breadwinner. At any rate, she had this newspaper story about him, and about his wife leaving England to move to Canada.
The piper started to play, and one of the participants, who was a new friend to me, said, “We're at this boy's funeral 94 years too late.” When you look across the sea of graves, you realize that very few of these graves have been seen by the family members. These boys died overseas; they were buried there. The family never got to see them.
So that was a very powerful moment.