The Mending Kids Club of San Marino High School, SMHS 4 MKI, will receive the Teen Leadership award at Mending Kids’ ‘Wings Around The Galaxy’ Gala on November 8th at Hangar 8 at the Santa Monica Airport. Mending Kids is a Los Angeles based non–profit organization that provides surgeries, free of charge, to children in need in the U.S. and 54 other countries around the world.
Started three years ago, SMHS 4 MKI has maintained over 30 energetic and determined student members each year. The devoted students have organized a classroom donation drive to collect items to go in goodie bags for Mending Kids’ surgery patients.
Other projects have included making blankets for the children, as well as hosting a fundraising bake sale. Some of the teens travel to Burbank to volunteer at the Mending Kids’ offices to assist with medical supply inventories and to help with packing supplies for medical missions.
One student, Anita Shenoi, and her mother Lalita, participated in a medical mission to Peru, accompanying a medical team that performed necessary surgeries on numerous children. The volunteers were able to see the work this non-profit does first hand including watching surgeries, entertaining the children and helping the parents and siblings of the patients.
Anita, Lalita and other volunteers on the mission also visited local schools, where they trained the children in dental care and they distributed books, toys and supplies to those in need, both in and out of the hospital.
“This was an amazing experience,” said Anita, “I am so grateful that Dr. Dean Anselmo of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, who volunteers with Mending Kids and headed the medical mission to Peru, came to our school last year to speak about Mending Kids and its remarkable work. It inspired me to not only want to join the medical mission, but to become a doctor someday. I strongly recommend that other teens go on one of these missions. It’s really a life changer.”
