Rather than eating turkey with families, woman, friend take toys to Mexico
When you’re sitting down to a loaded table this afternoon, you might just take a moment to think of Kristen Graves and the fast-food Thanksgiving she’s probably having.
Graves and two friends from Connecticut are partway through a 57-hour road tip to bring One Hundred Smiles to children at Casa Hogar, an orphanage in Oaxaca, Mexico.
They left Green Bay Tuesday in a truck loaded with gifts from students at Green Bay Southwest High School.
“It’s amazing to see how many people have brought stuff, ” senior Emily Drain 17, said Monday when the gifted were all collected and stowed in the truck.
Casa Hogar is a home for both orphaned children and those whose parents can’t care for them. It’s the only home in its area that provides a place for children with disabilities and those children make up about one-third of the home’s residents.
“The kids are there because they really need to be there,” said Graves, a 2000 graduate of Southwest.
She began going to the orphanage to work several years ago and met Bryan Nurnberger there.
He’d been working in his Connecticut hometown to raise money and other support for Casa Hogar. As the response grew, Nurnberger decide it was time to create an official organization to coordinate the efforts.
Simply Smiles was born.
Now graves is working to build Green Bay-based support for the organization. She recently planned a silent-auction fundraiser.
And with Southwest Junior Neena Amarnani, her neighbor, she developed the idea of One Hundred Smiles – collecting toys and other gifts for the children in the home.
In one week, Graves and Amarnani organized and completed the gift collection, working with students in Southwest’s Spanish classes.
She figured students were sick of projects such as coin collections and other fund drives. She hoped the idea of buying gifts for specific children would prove attractive.
Students who wanted to participate were given bags to fill and photocopied pages with information about a child at Casa Hogar – including age, clothing sizes and interests.
Then they hit the stores.
When the bags came back to Southwest, they were packed with toys, coloring books, clothing, personal-care products and more. “So many people came up to me and said they had a great time,” Amarnani said.
Many students went beyond the original plan, bringing gifts that were too big for the bags that were provided or extra gifts to fill more bags.
Senior Valerie Hanson, 17, said it wasn’t hard to get excited about this project. “Neena said that they haven’t even received presents before,” she said.
Graves, Nurnberger and Lauren Pelletier, also from Connecticut, are hoping to be in Oaxaca within 10 days. It usually takes about three days to reach the border, several more waiting for the truck to be cleared to cross the boarder and another two or more to get to the orphanage.
Graves and Nurnberger plan to stay at Casa Hogar until January. The gifts will be distributed on three kings Day, Jan. 6. The holiday, also known as the Epiphany, is the traditional gift-giving day in Mexcio, instead of Christmas day.
The presents are just one part of what Graves and Nurnberger are trying to do at Casa Hogar.
“Everything else is just day-to-day existence stuff with the kids,” Nurnberger said.
