July 27, 2009 - HeraldTimesOnline.com 

By Bob Zaltsberg H-T Editor | zaltsberg@heraldt.com 

Stories worth telling are everywhere.

That’s a key lesson all of the 500 or so teens who attended the annual Indiana University High School Journalism Institute this month should have learned.

One of those stories sat across from me in the Wright Quad dining hall last week when I was there to interact with some of the students.

Three students stopped by to talk over lunch. All were bright rays of sunshine in a profession prone to seeing dark clouds these days. One of the students was focused on broadcasting. Another was focused on public relations.

The third had a less conventional and quite ambitious goal.

Kendall Ciesemier wants to host a talk show. Don’t bet against her. The high school junior-to-be from Wheaton, Ill., has been beating the odds since she was born with a liver disease that has required her to undergo two transplant operations.

She’s spent countless hours in her young life caring about others and working to engage her teenage peers in doing the same.

An Oprah Winfrey holiday show about AIDS orphans in Africa set her on her path of inspiration and service. When she was 11 years old, she watched the show with her mother.

She was so moved by the program, which featured parentless kids her own age, she ran to her room when it was over and used her computer to find World Vision, an AIDS orphan sponsorship program. She gathered all the money she’d saved from birthdays and Christmases — more than $300 — and took it back downstairs to her mother, who helped her spend it to sponsor a young girl whose parents had died from AIDS.

Within months, her own health declined severely. As she faced a liver transplant, her wish was for people to contribute to her goal of helping AIDS orphans. From that wish, the nonprofit organization Kids Caring 4 Kids was born.

Her first liver transplant, a living donor transplant from her father, was done on June 25, 2004. She’ll matter-of-factly tell you she developed an aneurism of the hepatic artery, which required a second transplant less than two months later.

After she recovered and returned to school, she was waiting in a packed gymnasium with her classmates for a surprise assembly with former President Bill Clinton, who later in the day was to be talking about his book, “Giving,” on the Oprah show in nearby Chicago.

“(H)e was announced, and then he spoke to us about his book,” she told me in an e-mail follow-up to our talk on campus. “He then said something like ‘I actually came here to acknowledge someone at your school who is making a difference. Will Kendall Ciesemier come up here?’ It was crazy and insane. He told my school about my charity and then announced to them that I was going with him to be on Oprah that day. It was the most incredible and surreal experience of my life.”

Kids Caring 4 Kids has now raised more than $740,000 for projects that include providing clean water and feeding orphans, widows and AIDS patients in Zambia; supporting an orphan care center in South Africa; and building a Hope for Life Center in Kenya.

“Kids Caring 4 Kids, to me personally, is a pay it forward idea,” Kendall wrote. “I received the ultimate gift of life from an organ donor who lost their life. While I cannot do anything to personally thank or repay their kindness, I can work to change the lives of vulnerable children in Africa. My dream is for these kids in Africa to be healthy, educated, and grow up to help others in their own country.”

She said she “absolutely loved” IU’s journalism institute. Her dream of being a talk show host is very much alive.

“I want to have a show that sheds a light on the many different ‘good’ things people are doing for our world,” she wrote. “Most of news reports terrible accidents instead of positive stories about people making a difference. I became inspired to help others after seeing a news story. I want to provide inspiration so others will have the experience I did.”