Lazarus continues to be a presence up at the St-Sauveur camp, where T-shirts from every Sam Jam hang in the dining-hall rafters. T he 15th edition of the Sam Jam is Saturday, Aug. The event has raised more than $330,000 over the years for the Sam Lazarus Fund and helped to send more than 120 kids to camp: These days they are mainly young asylum seekers, orphaned or here without their parents. After he died, the family established the Sam Lazarus Fund at the Y and a trophy named for him is given at the season’s final banquet to the counsellor who exhibits the most leadership and concern for campers - “the most Sam-like qualities,” as Torge put it.Īnd every year family, friends and the Kanawana community gather for a hockey tournament-cum-street festival known as the Sam Jam. Lazarus found joy, too, at camp and spent happy summers at Camp YMCA Kanawana as a camper, a counsellor and a leader. “He felt he fit right in,” said Torge, bonded with kids who “understood hard times.” Her son was happy at Katimavik, a national youth volunteer service program where he worked with young people from abusive families, with young people who had trouble integrating. At his memorial, held in a filled-to-the-rafters Rialto Theatre, “I said, ‘Sam, look at this crowd.'” People were drawn to him.”Īnd yet, “he never felt like he was part of a group, which was crazy, because he was,” said Torge, 71. He chose to keep these disappointments to himself and “spent a lot of time being normal around other kids. And frustrations and failures had abounded in the form of unrewarding jobs and aborted projects. Learning disabilities made school difficult, for one. Life was not easy for him, said Torge, a freelance documentary film producer. I want to work with kids who have more hurdles that they have to get over, like me.'”
As he’d told his mother: “I want to travel, I want to have more experiences. Her affecting memoir of losing Sam and mourning him takes the form of letters to him and his imagined replies. Her son had been in Africa since November 2003, and his frequent emails were “packed with the excitement of a 25-year-old discovering new worlds and ways of living,” Torge wrote in Dear Sam: Grieving the Death of My Son (iUniverse, 2007, 128 pp). Sam died in early 2004 in Ghana, of malaria. It was such a good move for him.” Sam Lazarus with a young charge at a day care centre in Ghana, where he was a volunteer teacher. He would go off on trips on the weekends when he wasn’t working and to soccer games, where he was the only white face in the stadium. “In my mind, he died at the top of his game.
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