Fund-raising enterprise lives on
By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer
It's 2 p.m. on a quiet sidewalk in Liliha on Good Friday, and 13-year-old Maile Krienke is sitting behind the modern equivalent of a lemonade stand, waiting for customers.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Only there's nothing to drink. Instead, $7 buys you a 24-ounce plastic cup, a coupon to fill it up at any Jamba Juice and a chance to help send Maile to the Jazz Dance World Congress this summer in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Maile Krienke, center right, sells Jamba Juice cups to raise money for her trip to the Jazz Dance World Congress. Her helpers are, from left, Melina Krienke, Tiffany Tang and Marissa Krienke.
A passer-by stops and asks how business is going.
"Pretty good. We've sold eight already and this is just our first day," says Maile, a home schooler who first started dancing when she was 3 and decided it was the love of her life by age 11.
The congress is a big thing in the jazz dance world. Last year's event drew thousands of people, including Maile, to Buffalo, N.Y. This year's is going to be even bigger. All the students in her Kailua dance school who want to attend have to raise the money on their own.
Maile chose Jamba Juice. But for many local youngsters it could easily be Zippy's chili, Pizza Hut cards or something else.
Now there are boxes of the blue cups stacked inside her mother's Snacks R Us trading card store on Kuakini Street in a weathered, old-fashioned Honolulu neighborhood that has yet to see its first Jamba Juice or Starbucks.
Still, the day's sales started well.
Maile and her boyfriend, Jeffrey, sold seven cups quickly at a church fair down the street at Kunawai Neighborhood Park before setting up shop on the sidewalk.
For each sale, Maile gets to keep $3. The rest of the money goes back to Jamba Juice. At that rate she has to sell 500 cups to afford the $1,500 needed for airfare and a hotel in Costa Rica.
"Want to buy a Jamba Juice?" Maile asks everyone who walks by. Most shrug or smile, but few stop. Only the mailman has actually bought one.
"She loves to dance and she's very good at it," says Maile's mother, Luann, while several other children play under a flapping blue tarp behind the makeshift cup-sales stand.
Maile attends dance classes six hours a week and tries to spend at least another hour each day practicing.
"Sometimes, she'll stay up till 1 in the morning dancing," says Luann, who had to help her own mother run Lani's Lunchwagon, which operated on the same site years ago. "I scooped the rice and made the mac salad."
Luann says the entrepreneurial skills needed to raise money for the trip will serve Maile well in the future "It's a learning opportunity," she says.
Suddenly, two of Maile's sisters return from a sales trip into the neighborhood. They've just sold a cup to the owner of the Korean barbecue restaurant around the corner.
Nine down and only 491 more to go.
Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.
