Florida Catholic | Backpacks Boost Children’s Spirits

Backpacks boost children’s spirits

Give a Kid a Backpack Foundation has given more than 14,000 backpacks filled with school supplies to disadvantaged children over the last five years.

LAURA DODSON | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 03.28.08

Children in kindergarten through grade 5 at Voluntades Unidas and El Taladro school in Comayagua, Honduras, were the first Honduran recipients of backpacks from the Give a Kid a Backpack team.
Courtesy Photo

www.volunteermatch.org

CLERMONT | What started five years ago as a family project for the Kingstons of Blessed Sacrament Parish here has grown into a nonprofit organization that has given 14,000 backpacks filled with school supplies to disadvantaged children in the U.S. and abroad.

Rosanna and Laurence Kingston and their children, Hannah and Davin, were touched by a newspaper article and began distributing backpacks to needy children in 2003. The next year they established the Give a Kid a Backpack Foundation, which has partnered with businesses and not-for-profit entities —including the Diocese of Orlando Mission Office — to give away 25,000 pounds of supplies to children in 13 countries.

“School starts differently in different countries due to the picking season,” Rosanna Kingston explained. “The children work long hours out in the fields. In many areas, the land is not tame — there are snakes, spiders and other creatures that hurt them, but when they can go to school, at least they have the basic supplies they need.”

A backpack contains pencils, pens, erasers, a pencil sharpener, notebooks, folders, a ruler, scissors and more.

“It’s neat to see how proud the children are with their backpack,” said Father Fred Ruse of the Orlando Diocese. Working with the diocesan Mission Office, he serves five communities from his home in La Cucarita, a little town in the sister Diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, Dominican Republic. Kingston and her team delivered 500 backpacks to the communities in September 2007.

“Some of the backpacks seem almost oversized for them,” Father Ruse continued, “but they hoist them on their backs each morning or afternoon, depending on their school session, and trek up the hill, down the hill or however, depending on where they live in our communities.”

Father Ruse said education is a commodity in short supply in the mountain areas he serves.

“Our Mission Office has, with the support of many from throughout the diocese for many years, established the first Catholic school system,” he said. “The backpacks say education is serious and affirm the commitment these parents, their children and our teachers are making daily toward education.”

Father Ruse said the Dominican families take good care of the backpacks.

“They wash theirs regularly and you can see them hanging on a fence post next to a pasture or other pole drying,” said Father Ruse. “The Give a Kid a Backpack team was a real boost to the spirits here.”

The team, which grew to include four more families from Blessed Sacrament Parish, has just returned from delivering 740 backpacks to Comayagua, Honduras, where one in three children doesn’t have shoes. Their diet is so low in necessary nutrients that the children’s teeth are rotten by age 5.

The backpacks bring smiles to faces in the United States as well — in Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. In central Florida alone, 3,000 backpacks have been distributed to children living in poverty.

The team is headed to Panama, Ecuador and Peru in the months ahead. “Our committed goal for 2008 is 11,000 backpacks,” Kingston said. “We need donations, of course, and we need volunteers — to pack, to support events, to travel. We need those with administrative skills — grant writers, media systems.”

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