MUNCIE, Ind. — For a lot of folks, nothing is as comforting as a good cup of coffee.
With that in mind, Jonathan Shaw, an 8-year-old third-grader at St. Lawrence School, is producing some nice cups in the hope that money he raises will comfort the impoverished kids of Haiti.
What spurred his personal concern for those children?
“That’s kind of a tricky question,” the boy answered, shyly.
But his mother, Sarah Shaw, remembers it well. Jonathan was just a 4-year-old preschooler when a devastating earthquake hit that poor island nation, a heart-rending calamity that filled newspapers and newscasts with horrific tales for weeks.
Even at his tender age, Sarah said, her son was affected.
“He was just consumed with concern for the people of Haiti,” recalled the Taylor University fine arts graduate, who works in graphic design at Muncie Power Products. “Every day when I picked him up, he would ask about them.”
What’s more, word of the world’s humanitarian response to the tragedy didn’t allay his concerns.
“He’d just kind of look at me like, ‘OK, what are we gonna do?’ “ Sarah told The Star Press.
In discussing that question, the idea of making coffee cups came to mind.
“Everyone’s so into their coffee,” explained Sarah, whose artistic passions are drawing and pottery, and who apprenticed under Centerville potter Scott Shafer after graduating from college. Though she owned a potter’s wheel, she thought Jonathan was too young to throw clay, and she didn’t own a kiln at the time.
She thought the boy could work on “hand built” pottery, however, and called her old mentor.
“If we made the wares,” she asked Shafer, “could we bring them down and you fire them for us?”
His answer was yes, so in 2010 at 5 years of age, Jonathan began making the three parts of each cup — the handle, the base and the bowl. Cut from flat lengths of clay using cardboard templates Sarah made, the bowl’s template resembled a castle wall in which the notched battlements folded in to create its bottom. The seams and the parts are attached with what she called a “slurry” of wet, glue-like clay.
As Sarah explained all this, 50 new cups were being fired in the kiln she bought a year or so ago at an Ohio school-closing auction, in preparation for St. Lawrence School’s Fall Festival this weekend. With the cups costing $10 each, they have made and sold hundreds of them for the organization World Vision, each stamped on the bottom with the scripture verse Matthew 18:5 and CK with a cross inside the C, for the Cups for Kids program.
These days Jonathan, who has a Haitian pen pal, and Sarah have recruited other family members, namely her husband, Brian, daughter Hannah, 6, and son Andrew, 5, to join the effort.
“It’s become like a family project,” Sarah said, noting they are considering expanding into candlestick holders, birdhouses and such. “That’s the grander vision of what we’re hoping to do with our family. … On the weekends, if we don’t have school projects to do, we’re making cups.”
As this was being discussed, Jonathan sat beside his Mom, mostly mum like a lot of kids, but Sarah recalled how when her son encounters customers, he opens up.
“The first time he sold his cups he came to life, talking to people about it,” Sarah said with a smile. “He’s a good little salesman. I think his enthusiasm helps to sell them.”
This is an AP Member Exchange shared by The Star Press.
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