Some of the boys and girls of Grace Care Orphanage in West Nairobi, Kenya, lost their parents to AIDS. Some lost their parents to political turmoil. Others were simply abandoned.
Many of them have little grasp of what the Internet is. Despite the fact that Kenya won more than 10 medals at the most recent Summer Games, some of the kids have never heard of the Olympics, and they have no field on which to imagine their own athletic fantasies before the larger world is loosed upon them in their early teens.
But a pair of viral sports-reenactment videos starring these children in may soon change that.
At least, that's what Dan Freiman, a Canadian MBA student, hopes. He was a volunteer at the orphanage during the summer, when he and the kids traveled to a field a few miles a way to make a video recreation of Bill Buckner's iconic fielding error during the 1986 World Series.
That clip — which Freiman tells Mashable he made largely in order to have a keepsake from his trip and to provide an activity for the kids — was uploaded to YouTube in June. Then it unexpectedly became a hit, gaining more than 70,000 views in its first week and getting featured on MLB.com.
It also sparked a bigger idea: Why not make a second, more elaborate, video and use it to raise money to provide an actual field for the kids to play on everyday? And so the video you see at the top of this post was created, shot on-location and featuring all of the orphanage and its associated school's 200 kids.
The video recreates Boston Celtic Larry Bird's legendary steal and assist during the 1987 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. It's true to the most minute detail — including one Cyrus Kubesa standing in for future ESPN columnist Bill Simmons — and features the original broadcast's actual soundtrack to powerful effect. It's proved even more popular than Freiman and the Kenyan orphans' first effort, picking up more than 100,000 views in its first week online and being embedded on dozens of websites.
The Bird video is also a call to action, though. Freiman is hoping to use it as a springboard for volunteers to raise $56,000 for Grace Care to purchase and level a nearby field so that Cyrus and his peers can have an actual place to play, practice and learn longterm skills. The promotion has so far raised nearly $8,000 and has a deadline of Jan. 10.
"Sports teach life lessons — you learn to persevere, be part of a team, battle through adversity," Freiman says. "I think a field will help prepare them for the real world. Their real world is much more real than ours is here, and if they don't have the skills to survive, they quite frankly won't. This will hopefully give them some more basic skills and learn to project themselves a little bit more."
Freiman tells Mashable the children are aware of the fundraising and eager to follow its progress, but that they don't understand the world of online viral celebrity which they've entered.
"These kids don't even know what the Internet is really, they just don't have it," Freiman says. "They have a sense their videos are big in some way, and that they're cool, but they really have no idea. With the first one, they could barely understand how big the number was when I told them it'd reached 200,000 views."
But more than just help the kids from Grace Care, Freiman hopes the popularity of his videos can expand how non-profits aim to appeal to donors beyond the cliched images of forlorn and pitiful looking kids featured on TV infomercials.
"Maybe there's a more effective way of fundraising than showing orphans at their worst, as opposed to at their best," Freiman says. "These kids are very similar to the kids you see on TV, they're just having fun at the time you see them."
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