(Via Best of the Web) Leef Smith in the Washington Post reports on Finding It in Their Hearts:
Mantaine Minis, 6, was living in a hut in a remote village in Kenya, in need of lifesaving heart surgery, when the improbable happened one day in June. A group of students and parents from the Langley School in McLean was on safari at the Masai Mara National Reserve, where Mantaine's father is a game warden.Mantaine is doing well after surgery in the USA.
That's when someone from the village told a Langley teacher about Mantaine's heart problem. From there, things seemed to unfold quickly.
The teacher, Joseph Lekuton, knew that one of the parents was a Fairfax County heart surgeon. He also knew that people of the Masai village, who didn't own much, had sold 14 cows last year to raise money to donate to relief efforts in the United States after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
So he helped launch a campfire discussion about the Masai gift and about what a group of people from an American suburb could do to return a kindness.
"It wasn't a lot of money, but they gave those cows to say, 'Here, we feel your loss,' " Lekuton said he told the group before telling them Mantaine's story. "So, I asked the children, 'What can we do to help them?' . . . Really, it was magical. In just a short moment everyone agreed 'We can help her.' "
