Sgt. First Class Ken Solorzano of Alna told students at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb that the clothes and toys they donated made a difference to Afghan families, and to the soldiers who got to give them the gifts.

“My friends were so happy to get the packages …. You would have thought the gifts were for us … ,” Solarzano wrote weeks ago, in an emailed letter which daughter Helena Solorzano, 14, shared with her entire school. Now an eighth-grader, she's been attending the school on Cross Point Road since Kindergarten.

Her father, formerly of Boothbay, is serving in Afghanistan,  at a camp where Afghans captured on the battlefield are detained. The detainees' families, who come to visit them, were the recipients of the school's gifts, she said.

Solorzano's father wrote to the school: “Your acts of kindness have brought a sense of healing in a place where there has been great injury to many people. Governments talk about making things better all the time, but you kids have done more than that. You have made a difference over here.”

“ ... Many kids your same age, living in a far away and rugged land, thank you,” the letter states.

The soldier tells the students that Afghan families have few material things, but are resilient.

“Imagine living on the valley floor of a great steppe plateau, surrounded by massive mountains, where it hardly rains and the winds are fierce and the sun is hot, or the winters are brutal, and you live in a mud house with no electricity or running water. Imagine not having a whole lot to eat,” Solorzano writes.

“Maybe poor is not the right word. They are rich in many ways because they are focused on the basic necessities to live in the most rugged terrain I have ever seen, and they do it with smiles, in dance, in art and in brilliant colors,” the letter continues.

Solorzano's daughter is not sure when he will be home from Afghanistan.

The time he is away is not easy, but everyone at the school has been very supportive, from her friends to all the adults who work there, Helena Solorzano said.

The donated toys had to be less commercial than some of those popular in the U.S., like super hero dolls, which would mean little to the Afghan children, the CTL's Head of School Scott MacDonald said. The gifts included jacks and the classic, one-person paddle ball toy.

“They wouldn't necessarily understand plastic diamonds,” Helena Solorzano said. “Kids there are a lot less materialistic. They don't have much at all, so I think it was really great of the school to do this.”

The school regularly donates to the Lincoln County Animal Shelter and the Boothbay Region Food Pantry. The project for the families in Afghanistan was a natural extension of that work, MacDonald said.

In addition to toys, the school sent hats, socks, jackets and mittens.

Susan Johns can be reached at 207-844-4633 or sjohns@wiscassetnewspaper.com.