Gurnee woman collects swim suits, goggles for Honduran orphanage

A Gurnee resident is making more than a splash at an orphanage in Honduras.

She's enabling the children there to swim on their own.

That's because Stefanie Leafblad, 22, has collected nearly 150 suits and goggles for the children at the orphanage she's been working with the past year, Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos in Honduras.

Volunteers at the orphanage were encouraged to develop after-school programs for the students. Leafblad said she started a swimming program at the school.

"They were swimming in their underwear," Leafblad said. "This is going to mean so much to those kids."

She got her donations from local swim-team parents, who collected them from closets, rummage sales and pool lost-and-found containers, but then the effort went beyond that.

Leafblad came home Gurnee for spring break, and returned to Honduras with donations from TYR Sport, a swimwear maker, and Olympian Adolf Keifer.

"The word just spread like wildfire. I asked two people and I got responses from 10," Leafblad said. "The next thing you know I have sponsors and Olympians."

The swim drive started when Leafblad e-mailed her parents and asked if they would look around the community for used suits.

"I was really taken aback with the reaction. We didn't ask them to do that, they took the ball and they ran with it. That speaks volumes," said Cathy Leafblad, Stefanie's mother.

When head Libertyville and Vernon Hills' high school swim team head coach Jeff Arce heard about the swimwear drive, he contacted both TYR Sport and Keifer for donations.

"We do it because we have passion for the sport, and if we can do anything to spread that passion for the water, then we're going to help out," Arce said.

The students in Honduras are working on developing swimming techniques for competition. Leafblad is setting up swim competitions in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

"We swim in a pond and a dam. There are frogs and fish that swim by us," Leafblad said. "When we get to our first big meet, we're in a regulated pool."

The Augustana College graduate said she worked at the orphanage as a speech pathology and will remain in Honduras until August, then return to school for her masters. She has not selected a school.

She said she plans on staying in contact with the Orphanage after leaving the program, and hopes new volunteers continue the swimming program she began there.