by Pam Withers
Special thanks to my tree-planting son, Jeremy, and to Charlotte Gill’s beautifully written Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. Sober acknowledgement of the Congolese workers treated like slaves at a tree-planting camp in Golden, British Columbia, in 2010 (B.C. Human Rights Tribunal case against Khaira Enterprises).
Appreciation to Malcolm Scruggs, my outgoing teen editor, and Vansh Bali, my incoming teen editor (I fire ’em when they turn eighteen ). Vansh truly went above and beyond on this one! Warm thanks to Lynn Bennett, my agent; Maggie de Vries, author and writing workshop leader; Steve, my husband; Shannon Young and Silvana Bevilacqua, valued friends; and the Mayne Island Writers Group, especially Leanne Dyck.
Recommended further reading and viewing: Wolfgang Bauer’s gripping Crossing the Sea: With Syrians on the Exodus to Europe; How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers; The Jaguar’s Children by John Vaillant; and The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. Also, the movie Frozen River.
