Over the past three weeks I have been in Ireland and have had the opportunity to explore my roots. I was brought up on a farm in County Antrim, and although my father died when I was eight years old, we continued to run the farm. The farm was one hundred acres in size, but since my dad was dead we leased out the land to our neighbor, Mr Hollinger, and concentrated on keeping chickens ourselves, having as many as 30,000 chickens at one point. I would describe Mr Hollinger as a God fearing, principled man. I would work for him during the school holidays, digging potatoes and bringing in the hay, while I would work on our own farm, feeding the chickens and cleaning out the chicken houses during school term. Farming was very formative for me, not only did I learn to drive a tractor, but I imbibed the sense of honest endeavor that one had to have as a farmer.
This week I was able to revisit the farmstead where I grew up, and I found that the outhouses had fallen into disrepair and were no longer part of a working farm. The land was still under cultivation, but must have become part of a larger enterprise since the farmyard itself was no longer in use. This was the place where I had collected and cleaned eggs as a very small child, where I had learned to reverse a trailer as a teenager, and where I had mixed the meal to feed the chickens. It was a strange feeling to look over this farmyard and have all my childhood memories come flooding back. The visit brought a sense of a lost world, because life moves on while our childhood memories remain frozen, but such a world was no more, and those who peopled it now lay in the ground.
In Ireland we bury our dead in collective graveyards, so I went to the nearby cemetery to visit my father’s and mother’s graves, and in the process I found the plot where Mr Hollinger had been buried almost forty years ago. Although I had not thought about him for a very long time, I realized that he had imparted values and character to me as a teenager and his values still live in me. Since I was very young when my father died, my dad did not get much chance to influence me, but another man, who was just a neighbor, then played a role in my life. The funny thing is that I am in no way like that man: he was careful and risk averse and he never left Ireland, while I am an entrepreneur and risk taker and have travelled the world. But there are core values that I absorbed from him which have never left me – the sense of hard work, sticking to a job till it is done, and the value of diligence. But above all, the biggest impact on me was from the fact that he trusted me, allowing me to work with heavy farm machinery even though I was an unproven teenager. And because he believed in me I never wanted to let him down.
I now know that his belief in me was fundamental to who I later became. I have worked with hundreds of young Ugandans, many of whom have come back later to tell me that I gave them their first chance in life because I trusted them and believed in them. Sometimes I threw them in at the deep end, but they told me later that they never wanted to let me down.
Jim Hollinger, that small unprepossessing man, could never have known that the ripples he created by mentoring me would spread across the world to affect the lives of hundreds of young people. This is a poignant example of paying it forward: fifty years ago he helped a teenager whose father had died, and then he himself died, never knowing the knock on effect. Many people strive to leave a legacy by giving money to institutions to put their name on buildings but can they match the legacy of this simple farmer?
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