October 25, 2014

Re: Ghulam Sajan

Shaheen Sajan

Dear Mr. Stockdale:

Thank you for writing this well written and beautiful piece about my father, Ghulam Sajan.  You certainly did justice to him and did a great job paying homage to him for all his contributions to society.

I very much enjoyed reading your article and appreciated your effort to drive all the way to our area to interview myself and my sister, Fatima, about our dad. We met you at a time when we were just trying to overcome our loss and we really appreciated how compassionate you were. 

There are 5 correction in the article that I was hoping can be made.  They are as follows:

a) paragraph 5: he was a Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission

b) paragraph 9: yes, he was expelled from Uganda but so were all people of South Asian origin, it isn't necessary to say it was because of his charity work as it was only indirectly so.

c) paragraph 11: the Zainabiya Child Sponsorship program is now under World Federation.  The key word is to say it is under as the World Federation is a broad umbrella organization with many projects under it and I don't want to offend anyone by implying my dad was responsible for starting the World Federation, he started the child sponsorship program.

d) paragraph 17: I don't know if my dad gave vast sums of his own money to the charity in Tanzania or not, he probably did, but I can't say for certain, but I do know he did a lot of fundraising for them as a volunteer, simply because he believed in the cause.

e) paragraph 20: I would greatly appreciate it if you may please remove the reference to Justin Trudeau. You can say Harper instead, as my dad also wrote to him, or perhaps you can just say he wrote to government without singling anyone out.  We know our dad wouldn't like the reference to Trudeau here.

I would greatly appreciate it if these corrections can be made, the most urgent of them being point c and e.  It has come to my attention that yesterday, some of my other family members already shared this with a network of thousands and I hope these changes can be made before all those people read this as I do not wish to offend any of them.

Sincerely,

Shaheen Sajan