Week One: Who is my Neighbour?

The first few kilometres of a long walk are always deceptive.

Your legs feel fresh. Your pack doesn’t seem that heavy. The road stretches ahead with a kind of quiet optimism, and it’s easy to imagine that 500+ kilometres ahead of you is simply today’s walk repeated enough times.

But somewhere along the trail, reality sets in.

The endless walking, the subtle but unrelenting climbs, the gravel and rocky roads slowly wearing down your shoes, and the relentless 40-degree heat draining your energy. Slowly, the romance of the pilgrimage gives way to something deeper. Before long, all you’re left with are the questions that matter most.

As I prepared for this year’s Walking People Out of Poverty journey along Italy’s Via Francigena, I found myself asking a familiar question, “Why do I keep coming back?”

The answer goes back four years.

In 2022, while cycling the Tour de Victoria as a fundraiser for Opportunity International Canada, I stayed with my good friend, Peter Thorpe. Peter was already something of a legend around Opportunity. Every year he disappeared onto a long-distance trail, raising funds through what he called Walking People Out of Poverty.

Peter hadn’t been back on the trail since being medevac’d off the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019. He desperately wanted to return, but at 72, he needed someone willing to tackle it with him.

I was 62 and thought, “How hard could it be?“

In August 2023, I found out exactly how hard. 

350 kilometres later, with sore muscles, blistered feet and a very different appreciation for mountains, I discovered it was the hardest physical challenge I’d ever undertaken.

Then I returned in 2024.

And, again in 2025.

Together, those hikes have raised more than $300,000 to help families build pathways out of poverty.

So, when my friend Mark Petersen invited me to join him on his pilgrimage this year through Italy, I didn’t hesitate.

The novelty of the trail has already given way to aching legs and tired feet. Two days into the hike, the tread on my brand new HOKA Speedgoats have already started to come away on both the left and right shoe.

I’ve come to realize that the physical challenge—and even raising funds—can only carry me so far. What keeps me moving, and what draws me back year after year, is knowing that I am walking toward people.

I know the work we do is making a real difference in addressing global poverty. But somewhere in the meditation of hiking, my thoughts move from the theoretical to the deeply personal. I stop thinking about poverty as a global challenge and start thinking about the people I’ve met along the way – their names, faces, their children, and their homes.

Women in Haiti rebuilding their lives after unimaginable hardship.

Mothers in Colombia with nothing but the hope that a better life for their children is possible.

Farmers in Ghana, business owners in Nicaragua, families in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

They aren’t statistics – they have names.

As I reflect on their stories, the question in my mind changes.

It stops being, “How do we solve poverty?” and becomes, “Who am I walking toward?”

This reminds me of a question once asked of Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?“

His answer wasn’t a definition. It was a story.

A traveller was beaten, robbed and left for dead beside the road. Others saw him and kept walking. But a Samaritan—someone you’d never have expected—stopped. He bandaged the man’s wounds, carried him on his donkey, and took him to an Inn where he paid for his care. There’s a beautiful element of cross-cultural compassion to this story.

The neighbour wasn’t the person who lived nearby.

The neighbour was the one who chose to move closer to someone else’s suffering.

I think about the astronauts who recently circled the moon and looked back on the small bluish-green orb called Earth. They spoke of seeing a fragile blue planet suspended in darkness, without borders or boundaries—just one shared home.

Perhaps that’s one of the gifts of walking.

Distance begins to disappear.

People who once seemed far away become remarkably close.

Perhaps what makes someone my neighbour isn’t simply where they live, but whether I am willing to move toward them.

That realization changes everything.

The heat still comes. The blisters still form. The climbs are no less steep. But each step becomes an act of solidarity with people whose journeys are far more difficult than my own.

As you follow this pilgrimage over the coming weeks, I hope you’ll wrestle with the same question I will carry along the trail.

Who is my neighbour and what might it look like to walk toward them?

Some questions aren’t answered with a single step. They unfold as the journey continues.

Buon Cammino.