Kerrie Everitt woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy idea.
She and her husband, Tom, are both REALTORS® with Dexter Associates Realty in Vancouver and had been toying with the idea of taking a year off work to travel the world with their children, Capri and Bowen, for a family project to raise money for a charity close to their hearts.
Just how they would do that, however, had been escaping them.
“She wakes up at 3 a.m. and says, ‘Around the World in 80 Anthems.’ Can we do that? Can Capri do that?” Tom told the Canadian REALTORS Care® Foundation recently.
The inspiration came from their now 12-year-old daughter, who has been singing, playing piano and dancing since she was 5. Vancouverites know her as the city girl who busks with her keyboard and amplifier in front of her parents’ Main Street office.
Tom and Kerrie had wanted to put her talents to good use, if she was up for the challenge.
“She can really nail the American national anthem, and that’s a singer’s anthem,” Tom said. “So then we asked her if she thought she could do the Mexican anthem and she said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then she learned the Chinese anthem and kept going with it.”
She ended up learning 80 anthems in 41 different languages.
Tom connected with a friend who told him about SOS Children’s Villages, the world’s largest charity working with orphaned and abandoned children.
With a project and a cause now cemented, the Everitts were about to begin on a nine-month journey that would end up taking them around the world not once, but three and a half times on 49 different flights.
The journey began Nov. 20, 2015 in Ottawa at the Senate of Canada.
She sang at the oldest running carnival in the world in Equador. She sang with other children in Carnegie Hall in New York City and at the Opéra de Marseille in France. When there were no children available to sing with her — like in Mexico — REALTORS® would help setup events for the Everitts. She sang at SOS Villages in 40 of the 80 countries the family visited and sang with the children living there.
“It became this thing where it wasn’t about my daughter, but children singing with other children,” Tom said. “The kids were extremely flattered that she went out and learned their anthems.”
Media outlets across the world, including CBS affiliates in the United States, BBC Oxford, the New Indian Express and the Toronto Star, featured articles and segments about what she and the family were doing.
“Everything we hoped would happen, happened,” Tom beamed.
Out of all the countries they visited on their whirlwind world tour, Tom said India left the biggest lasting impression.
“In the SOS Village there, the children are only allowed to use water from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. and again from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. They have 200 litres a day for 175 kids. And the craziest thing about it isn’t that, the craziest thing is nobody wants to leave, they want to get in. The poverty is just that brutal.”
He said his children came back with a newfound appreciation of the lives they have in Canada.
The official ending to the tour was August 12 at a Washington Nationals baseball game where Capri belted out the American anthem in front of thousands of people with representatives from the Canadian Embassy in attendance.
But it was the unofficial ending that gained a lot of attention on social media.
While in France, the family posted a picture to Facebook of Capri holding up a sign asking the Blue Jays organization to sing the Canadian anthem at the Rogers Centre.
That post got 3,000 shares in 12 hours and the family was contacted by the Blue Jays by the end of the day extending an invite to Capri to sing.
“They said, ‘Can you go on Facebook and say that we agreed to have her sing? Our phones are going crazy with people telling us to get her here,’” Tom said.
When the tour was all said and done, Capri became a Guiness World Record Holder for singing 80 anthems in 80 countries and she was featured in a video made up of child prodigies from across the globe singing a rendition of Michael Jackson’s Heal The World.
Now the family has returned to their Vancouver home and is still compiling all the donations they’ve received. So far, Tom said they have raised more than $100,000 for SOS Children’s Villages and that money is still coming in.
“That doesn’t account for all the millions of dollars worth of advertising and coverage we got for SOS Villages worldwide, either,” Tom said.
He said he couldn’t be prouder of Capri — and Bowen, for blogging the whole tour.
“A lot of people can’t do what we did. We couldn’t even afford it,” he said, adding the family sold their cars and rented out their house to help cover costs. “I think we learned in life if we don’t make the decisions, the decisions will get made for us. We made the decision to do this while we’re young, healthy and while we could enjoy it and there’s not a moment where we had any regrets.”
