FULLERTON – Project Birthday Angel began nearly four years ago, when a homeless child told Sarah Keung he hated birthdays.
What child hates birthdays?
She devised a plan.
The youth ministry at First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton sponsors a program called Summer Servants, which Keung joined in 2011. The daughter of longstanding parishioners, Keung spent the summer before her freshman year at Sunny Hills High serving homeless families in Anaheim.
She and parishioners young and old also held Bible schools for the homeless children, and they served families food twice a week. Keung even spent a night at the hotel where the city’s homeless often stay, later telling her father how appreciative the families were for receiving basic needs such as clothes, socks and underwear.
Keung, a Girl Scout since kindergarten and now a varsity basketball player at Sunny Hills, embedded herself in the community that summer in 2011, developing friendships she still holds dear. It pained her when the school year began. Summer Servants shouldn’t just be a summer thing, Keung told her father. It should be year-round.
“I fell in love with the people there,” Keung said last week. “Even after the summer ended, I wanted to continue serving there.”
Chi-Chung Keung, Sarah’s father, said he and his wife “helped only by nurturing (Sarah’s) ideas, giving her confidence, encouragement.” He said they didn’t do a single thing for Project Birthday Angel other than “help her keep her vision alive.”
Sarah Keung recently received the Girl Scout Gold Award, the organization’s highest honor, for her four-years-in-the-making plan to never again hear a homeless child say he hates birthdays.
“There’s so much joy in giving,” she said.
Birthday Angel is a ministry at First Evangelical Free Church to which parishioners and others donate money. That money is for homeless parents to purchase gifts for their children’s birthday.
“(Gifts) will not be a free handout to the child from a stranger,” Keung wrote in her Gold Award thesis, “but a gift coming from their parent. They will feel special and loved on their special day.”
Last July, 25 gifts were purchased and distributed to the children at a party at the Anaheim hotel. Keung said she hopes Birthday Angel becomes an annual celebration. She continues serving homeless families at the hotel twice a week and also tutors the youth.
“The neatest thing I’ve seen is the people and their personal testimonies,” she said. “Most of them have nothing. They work a day job or they work their butts off, but they’re so generous. It makes me more appreciative for what I have, and it makes the struggles I go through so minute compared to what they’ve gone through.”
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The Keung family has a running joke that Sarah, the younger of two children, received her athleticism from her father and her heart and compassion from her mother.
Chi-Chung Keung grew up playing sports, and said no matter the hour, some sporting event is on television at home. He never pushed his children to play sports, but their interest in athletics grew. Sarah Keung became a pretty good tennis player, with basketball serving as her primary leisure activity. She hardly played for her seventh-grade basketball team, and was cut as an eighth-grader. “It wasn’t anything serious,” she said.
Rather than take a P.E. class her freshman year, Keung tried out for Sunny Hills.
Why not? I’ll go for it. I have nothing to lose.
Keung made the frosh/soph team that winter, one of only three girls that hadn’t played summer ball to earn a spot.
“I was 18 out of 18,” she said, laughing. “The worst player. But after developing a love, an enjoyment of not only the game, but the people around me I played with, I tried to become better. I joined different club teams, I practiced hard. That’s when I developed my skills, my passion for basketball.”
Keung wanted to letter in basketball her junior year. She quit playing tennis for Sunny Hills in 2013, choosing instead to focus all her attention on basketball. She would practice with the junior varsity team for two hours, then practice with the varsity. All summer.
Craig Weinreich, Sunny Hills’ longtime girls basketball coach, saw Keung’s heart, making his decision to leave her on junior varsity exceedingly difficult. Weinreich had a surplus of guards last season, meaning Keung likely wouldn’t have played much. Weinreich thought, all things considered, it was in Keung’s best interest to play 28-30 minutes a game running point for the junior varsity team. Better than riding the pine on varsity.
Devastated, Keung nearly quit.
“I learned to push myself and to be hard on myself, but also to appreciate the small steps of my improvement and focus on the positives,” she said.
Keung developed her chops in 2014 against the next wave of varsity players. She’s a first-year letter winner this season, starting regularly for Sunny Hills. She’s averaging two points, two rebounds and two steals a game.
But her greatest contribution, Weinreich said, is her influence on Sunny Hills’ underclassmen: She’s a leader, in the classroom as well as in the gym.
“Sarah’s a driven, focused player,” Weinreich said. “She’s organized. She knows her goals, and knows how to accomplish them. She has the will power to push herself in that direction. Her love for the game, her desire to compete, she’s always looking for advice, for ways to get better.”
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This summer Keung sought a way to merge her passions for basketball and ministry.
With her father’s help, and a friend’s recommendation, she came across SportQuest, a program that for years has sent groups of student-athletes across the globe on faith-based expeditions to play sports with poor children.
Keung raised more than $3,200 this past summer to fund her 12-day mission to San Juan, Costa Rica, where 25 athletes of all ages held various sports camps for the city’s youth. She was the youngest, likely the greenest athlete, too.
“It was a neat way to give back, to use what I’ve learned at Sunny Hills across the world,” said Keung, who celebrated her 17th birthday while on the mission.
“It’s neat taking what I’ve learned here – not only the physical skill, but the mind-set, the relationships I’ve built, the lessons I’ve learned – and use that in different relationships I have with people and different situations I come across.”
Keung is awaiting acceptance letters from the colleges to which she applied.
She loves basketball, but knows her lithe 5-foot-2 frame will likely keep her from playing at the collegiate level. She wants to remain involved, however. Intramural leagues, perhaps.
Keung and her father recently began a basketball ministry at their church, where newcomers participate, learn and build relationships through the sport. She’s expressed interest in entering the medical field, and is planning to join Athletes in Action, an organization similar to SportQuest, for a second international expedition.
“I see someone that’s a conduit, a vessel that’ll have an impact in the lives of people,” Chi-Chung Keung said. “She has the time, talent, resources and sense of destiny that God is going to be doing things through her. She’s like any athlete – when she does something, she wants to be excellent.”
Contact the writer: 714-704-3790 or bwhitehead@ocregister.com
