Farmingville pencil maker does right by Kenya orphans

BY GARY DYMSKI
gary.dymski@newsday.com

April 15, 2008

Larry Hohler, a retired Smithtown teacher and president of Hope Children's Fund, always can use school supplies. Carmine Russo has a small company that manufactures safety pencils.

Sounds like a match - one made in heaven for 51 orphans ages 6 to 13 in the small Kenyan town of Meru. When Russo heard about Hohler's need for supplies, he donated 2,500 safety pencils, a retail value of about $1,500, to the orphanage built in 2005 by Hope Children's Fund, a Port Jefferson nonprofit.

"We're always in need of supplies of any kind - books, pencils, pens," said Hohler, who co-founded the nonprofit with a former student, Kirima Rwito, in 2002. "We can use virtually everything."

Hohler saw firsthand a need for relief as a teacher in Kenya's Eastern Province during the mid-1970s. He and Rwito, now an educator in his native country, decided to build an orphanage for the children orphaned by Africa's AIDS epidemic of the mid-1990s.

Hohler said it costs about $50,000 a year to run the orphanage. The nonprofit, which focuses primarily on helping the orphanage and neighboring communities, has two fundraising efforts annually on Long Island, including Sunday's Kenya-USA Bi-Continental 5K Run, at Shoreham-Wading River High School. (Register at hopechildrens fund.org.)

Russo's donation followed his gift last year of 40,000 safety pencils - called the Pencil Shield because it has a plastic cap to cover the pencil tip - to Long Island school districts, part of a safety-pledge program for kindergarten students.

He said he got the idea for safety pencils four years ago when a neighbor's son impaled a leg on a sharp pencil point.

He credits his daughter, Briella, soon to be 5, for providing creative influence. When she was a toddler, he said, "she was walking around with a cap to a pen, and I was watching, hoping she would not put it in her mouth. She reached into a box of pencils, put the pen cap on one and said, 'Here.'"

He initially called the product Pointless Pencil - hence the Farmingville company's name, Pointless Products (point lessproducts.com) - before shifting to Pencil Shield and is now working with Musgrave Pencil Co., based in Shelbyville, Tenn., to make and help market the product.