John and Shelley Eby weren't interested in a conventional retirement of golf, cruises and condos in Florida. Instead, they started a little NGO in Guatemala and built a high school.
“We wanted something challenging,” says Shelley. “With this, you see the difference, and the impact of it.”
The high school, in the remote, impoverished agricultural community of Primavera, opened earlier this month. It has 26 students, with many more to come. Before now, kids who wanted to go to high school had to go to the city. Hardly anyone could afford it, and university was utterly beyond reach. The Ebys have also launched a scholarship fund so promising students can afford to stay in school and go as far as their abilities will take them.
This is not the picture of boomers in retirement that we have been led to imagine. Boomers, we are warned, will soon be a huge drain on society. As they age into senility, their pension entitlements and medical demands will suck the system dry. They will consume far more than they produce. Unless the system is radically reformed, future generations of workers will be paying through the nose so self-absorbed geezers can enjoy 30 years of idleness to perfect their golf scores.
In fact, most of the “retirees” I know don't fit this picture at all. They are as engaged as they were at work. They want challenge. They are searching for ways to enrich their lives by giving back, and by forging deep and meaningful ties with their communities.
My friend Martha worked furiously to build a successful business, then cashed out. Now in her late 50s, she's working furiously with a group of talented South Africans to build a microcredit operation in Soweto. My friends Rowlie and Kate, in their 70s, are silent partners in a charming small-town bookstore, along with several other enterprises that probably wouldn't exist without them. A retired businessman I know started a program to reforest unused rural land with maple trees, and uses his own money to subsidize it. One friend (who died too soon after she retired) persuaded some of Toronto's major cultural institutions to give free one-year memberships to new Canadian citizens. Another founded an arts program for inner-city students that has grown to reach 8,000 kids a year.
“You just get a feeling you should be giving something back,” John Eby says. “It's pretty arrogant to divorce yourself from what's going on around you.”
John was 55 when he retired from a senior banking job at Scotia Capital. That was more than three years ago. Shelley had worked in second-language programs at the Toronto school board. They had lived and travelled overseas, spoke some Spanish, and were affluent enough to be able to spend the winter months anywhere they wanted. In search of some place that was culturally interesting, they discovered the Guatemalan city of Antigua, an old colonial town with an ideal climate and a growing number of expats. On an impulse, they bought a house.
Guatemalans are grindingly poor, and intensely proud. Gradually, in small ways, the Ebys got involved. They donated a bit of money to replace the wobbly benches in a local school. They visited a typing class where kids were practising on battered old machines with no ribbons. (To enter Grade 10, students have to pass a typing test.) They bought some ribbons. “People would ask for a little help with this or that,” says Shelley. “And our money went so far.”
One thing led to another, and they decided to put their skills to work by founding Developing Scholars, a tiny non-profit agency that would focus on education in rural areas where the need is greatest. These areas have a high population of indigenous Mayans, who have been badly neglected by the government. Just 30 per cent of rural students in Guatemala complete Grade 3.
