ShawneeDispatch.com

Tanzania may be more than 8,000 miles from Kansas, but that hasn’t stopped Silver Blades Figure Skating Club from helping their African counterparts.

Amy Miller, a member of Silver Blades and its junior board, coordinated a service project for Silver Blades Junior Board that benefited an orphanage in Tanzania.

Miller, a Shawnee Mission Northwest sophomore, came up with the idea after seeing photos of the impoverished country while reading a blog by her cousin, Kristen Rau, a Rotary Academic Ambassadorial Scholar in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

“I think everyone was just thinking that we take advantage of what we have,” Amy said. “We don’t think about how people don’t have the necessities to live.”

Rau’s blog recounted her time visiting a youth center where children “lack sufficient food, a safely-constructed school building, pens, paper and just about everything children require to develop into healthy youth, teenagers and adults.”

Amy approached other members of the Silver Blades’ junior board about creating a drive to benefit the Korogwe Orphanage and Youth Center.

“They were all really excited,” Amy said about the idea. “Silver Blades is about skating, service and socializing.”

The Junior Board comprises Silver Blade members in third through 12th grade and provides an opportunity for members to interact off the ice, share talents and interest and help in the community.

The club distributed fliers at the Ice Midwest Family Skating Center in Overland Park and placed Rubbermaid containers at the rink for donations of gently used clothing, school supplies and toys.

The drive began Dec. 6 and concluded Jan. 31. In all, the group collected 667 items.

“I was really surprised at the number of things we collected,” Amy said. “There weren’t any surprising items but the high -quality and new supplies of things.”

Now that the drive has ended the Silver Blades are faced with another hurdle – shipping the items to Tanzania.

“It’ll cost about $300 or $400 to ship everything,” Amy said. “Now, we’re trying to raise funds for that. The Junior Board has a fund that will contribute money to the shipping, but it’s not enough.”

As part of the project, members of the junior board wrote letters in Swahili to children at the orphanage.

Amy contacted the orphanage director to have simple sentences translated, such as “I live in Kansas in the United States of America” and “I like to skate.”

“We wanted to give them the idea that we were thinking of them,” Amy said.

The service project didn’t just teach the Silver Blades about helping others, she said.

“I learned that it takes a lot to pull everyone together,” Amy said. “It was worth it, everyone took it seriously. One girl even talked to her principal and got her school involved.”

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