For many high school seniors in America, life is full of pleasures - football games, clothes, parties, proms. For Kaylee Ann Laster, those pleasures are tinged with a realization that many children in the world don’t enjoy such luxuries.
Kaylee, 17, is a cheerleader at Pea Ridge High School and enjoys the football games and cheer competitions. But she also has a passion for Sauda, a little girl in East Africa. So Kaylee has begun collecting stuffed animals and designed T-shirts to sell to raise the postage to send the stuffed animals to Sauda’s village by Christmas.
“I went to Uganda the fi rst time when I was 14,” Kaylee remembered. “I guess my parents felt like they needed to go. They had been praying about it and had it narrowed down to about three places.”
Ultimately, Kaylee’s parents, Mark and Kim, feltlike God wanted them to go to Uganda. There, the Lasters connected with Empower a Child - a nonprofit Christian organization based in East Africa, Uganda and Kenya - and worked there for two weeks. For the first week, they worked in the city, visited orphanages, played with and fed the children and cleaned the schools. During the second week, Kaylee said, they traveled to a village, Ziroobwe.
“We built goat sheds out of mud and sticks and gave them goats,” Kaylee said. “We stayed in the village that has no electricity or running water. We were in a tent.
“It’s so different! The city looks like a normal city, but just 15 miles away, the roads are dirt. The houses are mud with straw roofs. Most of the houses have the walls knocked in. The children have one shirt each.”
Kaylee said a church is now being built in the village by Empower a Child.
Kaylee’s first trip was in 2010. She returned in 2012.
“It was the same place, the same people. There was a little girl there that started following me around. Shedidn’t speak English. (In the city, they do.) She looked like she was about 6, and she had a bunch of brothers and sisters.”
Kaylee said it only costs $35 to sponsor a child for a month. The money from sponsors provides school fees, a mattress and food for the children.
And Kaylee learned this little girl, Sauda, wasn’t being sponsored
“I kept thinking about her and missing her. Finally she was put on the list to be sponsored, and I started sponsoring her. We really wanted to go back to the village to see her and her family.”
Kaylee said she learned that Sauda has four brothers; she is the only girl. Between the Lasters’ two visits, Sauda’s father died and her mother had another baby who had health problems.
“We took about 50 stuff ed animals the second time we went,” Kaylee remembered, “and gave them to the children in orphanages and the village. We gave them solar lanterns and food. I spent time with her, worked on the church and planted grass.
“When I first got there, I was just shocked at how littlethey had and how much we have. We don’t even realize how good we have it here. Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll just start thinking about it.
“If a kid came from Africa to here, they wouldn’t know what to do,” Kaylee said. “They live on less than $1 a day. I think I want things, then I realize that I don’t need them. I realize I’m being selfish and know I could use the money for clothes for Sauda. I send her clothes. Her brotherjust got sponsored by one of my mom’s friends.”
So Kaylee started “Share the Lovies,” a nonprofit organization to collect and ship stuffed animals to needy children in Ziroobwe and around the world.
“We want to be able to send them before the end of October,” Kaylee said, because it takes about two months to reach East Africa. T-shirts are $13 and come in all sizes from youth to extra-large. “If we get a lot of animals, we will also take some to the Arkansas Baptist Children’s Home in Monticello in November.
“Recently, my mom and I were looking at pictures of Africa and missing it,” she said. “We saw the pictures of Sauda’s family holdingthe bears and were excited to send more.”
“We are very proud of the Kaylee and the passion she has for helping the children of Uganda and other places around the world,” her mother, Kim Laster, said. “Every time she gets more stuffed animals or shipping donations, it’s like Christmas for us, because we know how important it will be to a child somewhere who doesn’t have any toys to play with or stuft ed animals to love.”
“The work that Kaylee is doing is outstanding work,” agreed Rick Neal, superintendent of the Pea Ridge School District and former high school principal. “She’s a tremendous kid in our district, and we really applaud her for the work she’s done.”
Life, Pages 6 on 10/02/2013