Jacqueline Whitehead

Jacqueline Whitehead - May 22, 2012 9:49AM

I do a lot of good for this world. More than most people will ever know. I’ve been doing this work for about two years now. There’s a couple non-profits that do it but I’m with the Reclamation Project. Our mission statement is simple – we reconnect parents with their children. When we’re assigned a client, we meet with them in real life or Pangea, find out about their child and why they lost them, and then search Pangea high and low for them. Sometimes it’s a kid that ran away from home. Sometimes it’s older kids who moved out for one reason or another and we’re trying to bring the family back together. Other times, unfortunately, it may be a situation where a child was abducted. In those cases, we have a special unit that handles it. I haven’t been a part of this long enough to be at that level but I don’t think I’d every really want to do that. It’s too sad for me.

In either case, we rely on the fact that at some point, everyone sleeps and everyone is a part of Pangea whether they know it exists or not. They dream, they have nightmares, they laugh and cry in this world. Our job is to find them and convince them to go back home. It’s tough stuff and it definitely doesn’t always work out well. But when it does, it’s a beautiful thing. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the Youtube videos of families reconnecting thanks to the work we’ve done with their kids in Pangea. If you haven’t you should do yourself a favor and check it out. If you can watch one of those videos and not cry, you have no soul. I’m sorry.

Anyway, the case I remember the most was one where I had to find a boy whose parents thought ran away from home. He was 10 or 11 at the time. They went the normal route with real life police and everything but two months later, they still couldn’t find him. So they brought us in and I was given the assignment of finding the boy. His name was Nasir. I went to the normal places in Pangea – the city sized indoor water parks, the super malls, Disneyland, different schools from popular movies – nothing. I reported back to my bosses and they told me to expand the search. This was during the World Cup. So one of the Reclaimers I worked with suggested I go to a Pangea World Cup match to see if I could find the boy. You gotta realize this was a crazy idea at the time. There’s probably ten million people in a single stadium to watch the match. All these people from around the world who are dreaming about the same thing at the same time. They’re reliving it all at once while imagining themselves in the stadium, taking in the action in person. It’s beyond hectic.

But I took the advice and I went to the match. There were even more people than I would have thought possible but surprisingly, I found Nasir almost immediately. He was in line to get a hot dog or something. I recognized him and went up to him and told him who I was and that his parents wanted him to come back home. That’s when he told me that he never ran away in the first place. He was kidnapped.

My heart dropped. I thought he was pulling my leg but I remember the panic in his eyes. I’ll never forget that. Never.

I don’t want to relive what happened after that but just know that we got him home. It took backup, an all out battle, and more than I would have cared to see. But we got him back.

And I’ve never been the same ever since.