11 million pennies for 11 million orphans

PARK CITY — At the entrance to Michelle Stratton's eighth-grade English classroom at Treasure Mountain International School, you have to be careful to step around multiple containers packed with pennies.

For a month now, the kids in Ms. Stratton's class, as well as students from other classes, have been emptying their pockets and stuffing the jars with Abraham Lincolns.

So what's up with all the pennies? Are they a fund for a big party when school ends in a couple of weeks? A bribe for a better grade? A class project about all the copper in Utah's mountains?

Nope. None of the above.

To the students at Treasure Mountain, each penny represents an orphan in Africa, where there are 11 million orphans.

Their goal is to collect 11 million pennies and send them to Africa to hopefully help make life there a little easier.

Specifically, the money — 11 million pennies translates to $110,000 — is earmarked for St. Johnson Primary School in Uganda, a school/orphanage that recently became Treasure Mountain's sister school.

The kids at Treasure Mountain have taken that penny-sharing concept you see at convenience store counters — "have a penny, leave one; need a penny, take one" — to whole new heights.

They have pennies, the kids in Africa need pennies.

As eighth-grader Hanna Aaronson put it, "To us, a penny is really nothing, but to them, it could be everything."

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The spark for Pennies for Uganda was lit last month when a man from Uganda named David Ssejinja came to Park City and spoke to the students about the plight of school kids in Africa. War and AIDS are the biggest orphan-makers there, he explained, and every day hundreds of youngsters arrive at schools like St. Johnson — empty-handed, penniless.

The message penetrated through to every cell phone-packing, iTunes-listening 13- and 14-year-old in the audience.

"Here I am in $200 jeans and those kids have nothing," said eighth-grader Katerina Ioannides.

"They showed us a video of the kids and they're happy, but they need just about everything," said Myles Ricks.

"They have to overcome a lot," said Bree Murrin.

Ms. Stratton urged her students to brainstorm a way to help, and Ben Belfort came up with the idea of collecting pennies.

Earlier in the year, the students had studied the Holocaust and how a group of middle-schoolers in Tennessee had started a paperclip project to gather enough paperclips to represent the 6 million Holocaust victims lost in World War II.

"Paperclips wasn't going to help anybody," said Belfort. "We needed something that would benefit others."

From there, the idea mushroomed.