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Newsday story on The Magic Penny [ October 29, 2006]
The magic in shared pennies
BY RHODA AMON
Newsday Staff Writer
October 29, 2006
Soon after Lucy Sumner came to the United States from her native Sierra Leone in 1963 to study music education at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, she came upon a song called "The Magic Penny," which would stay with her for the rest of her life.
The lyrics by composer Malvina Reynolds talk of love as "just like a magic penny/Hold it tight and you won't have any/Lend it, spend it and you'll have so many/They'll roll all over the floor."
When she retired in 2000 after 31 years of teaching music in the Harborfields Central School District, Sumner knew exactly how she wanted to spend both her time and her money. She founded The Magic Penny, a nonprofit organization to help the people of her small village, Bompehtoke, and the surrounding communities.
The goal, she said, is to empower the impoverished rural villages in that West African nation by fostering education, health care and economic growth.
Building a school
The immediate project is to build a primary school for a cluster of six villages, including about 600 children. After 11 years of devastating civil war, she said, "the children have nothing - just a rudimentary outdoor school with no supplies, no writing materials. The teachers sometimes serve three or four months without getting paid. They teach by rote."
Education, she said, is the main avenue to help solve their problems.
But Sumner's dreams go beyond the schoolhouse. She sees The Magic Penny as no less than a factor in transforming Sierra Leone into a peaceful and stable democracy.
The nonprofit, based in East Northport, has a dozen people on its board, and depends on an annual fundraiser and individual donations. "We are also looking for a grant writer to help us get funding," Sumner said. But sometimes the need is even more immediate. The group, she said, is seeking a used SUV to help volunteers get to the remote villages, particularly during the long rainy season from May to October.
Sumner, then Lucy LeFevre, left her village at age 5 to live with her grandfather, a chieftain, in his compound in Shenge, the seat of the chiefdom of Kagboro. There she got her elementary education, then went on to board at the Harford Secondary School for Girls, an American-sponsored United Methodist mission school in Moyamba.
It was there her musical and academic talents came to the fore. She won a scholarship to Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., where she got her bachelor's degree. She went on to get master's in music education from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and in social sciences from Long Island University.
In her comfortable living room in East Northport, surrounded by African folk art, Sumner, 61, reflects on what she can do for Sierra Leone.
"I know what education has done for me," she said. With her is her close friend and fellow music teacher Joan Nickels, 62, who retired from Harborfields in 1999, a year before Sumner. Both are members of the Retired United Teachers of Harborfields, called RUTH, many of whose members have been solidly behind the Sierra Leone project.
Community helps
Their Magic Penny motto is "One finger cannot pick up a stone." The retired teachers of Harborfields and other board members already have shown that a number of hands can raise a lot of stones.
A community center, the first in the war-ravaged village of Bompehtoke, is nearing completion. Five wells now supply fresh water. "Before that, people would have to get water from the stream and they would get typhoid and dysentery," Sumner said. Sanitary facilities have been built throughout the village where there were none before.
"Lucy inspired all this with her enthusiasm," Nickels said. "When you know Lucy, you want to support her projects. Lucy is always helping people."
"We started with nothing," Sumner said of Magic Penny. "We were just 10 people from all walks of life. None of us is rich." In two years, she said, the group has raised $15,000.
They need to raise $360,000 to build the primary school on 7 1/2 acres donated by a local resident. More funds will be needed for staff quarters where teachers and a principal can live, and also to build a library.
They also want to buy uniforms for the children. "Uniforms put everyone on the same level," said Sumner, who heads the New York-New Jersey chapter of the Harford Alumnae Association, one of a worldwide network of alumnae associations - four in the United States - that helped keep the school alive and humming during the long war years. "It's one of the best schools in Sierra Leone."
Sumner said her mother, Gladys LeFevre, a teacher and social advocate, worked hard to hold the village population together and to keep the children in school. She died in 1984. "After that, everything went downhill," Sumner said. Herself the mother of four grown sons, Sumner wants to fulfill her mother's dreams as well as her own.
She leaves Nov. 24 on her annual working trip to Sierra Leone, where she'll join forces with her sister, Annie Bangura, who lives in Freetown, and looks after The Magic Penny projects.
Although their mother never had the resources to fulfill her hopes for the village, Sumner said, "I know she's smiling down on us."
Supporting independence
The Magic Penny, a 501(c3) charity, promotes self-sufficiency in Sierra Leone through cottage industries such as sewing. Village women create colorfully adorned handmade folk dolls for sale.
To help raise funds, The Magic Penny sells the dolls for $20. For more information about the work of the organization, call 631-486-3822. Contributions also can be mailed to The Magic Penny,
24 Eldorado Dr.,
East Northport, NY 11731.
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