On their trip to Africa over the holidays, Sean Stephens and his two teenage kids, Trinity and Kai, joked that climbing Mount Kilimanjaro could be the toughest challenge they’d face in their lifetimes.
Just days later, they had guns held to their heads and were threatened with death by kidnappers, who also warned they would r*pe Trinity if they didn’t get what they wanted.
Stephens, the green-haired CEO of Newmarket’s Treefrog digital transformation company, spent Trinity’s 18th birthday (Dec. 22) scaling the Tanzanian mountain with his children, a much tougher experience than he’d anticipated.
Then, it was off to South Africa to visit his parents.
Stephens’ parents split several years ago and his dad spends half the year in Newmarket.
But he only gets to see his mom every few years and he hadn’t been to Africa, where he grew up during the Angolan Civil War, for about 20 years.
For the last three decades, his mom, Heather, has worked with orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa in the province of Mpumalanga, which sits south of the massive Kruger National Park wildlife game reserve.
To the east of the reserve is Mozambique. Mozambicans, including orphans, fleeing their country often travel through the reserve to Mpumalanga, where Stephens said one in five children are orphans.
