Taking the Kids™

Granting a Wish for the Trip of a Young Lifetime

Sometimes travel is the best medicine. At least 17-year-old Shelby Johnson thinks so. The Memphis teen, who battles a chronic neuro-muscular disorder, is convinced that a trip to Paris improved the quality of her life dramatically. “I was so focused on everything I couldn’t do,” Shelby explained. “Paris gave me a chance to forget all that. It was the turning point. I started to get better.”

Shelby, a triplet, was first diagnosed when she was four. At 14, she was sicker than she’d been in years, her mom Karen Johnson recalls, too weak to wash her own hair or more important to the young artist, to paint. She was terribly depressed.

Then the Make a Wish Foundation called, offering to send Shelby and her family – mom and three siblings – on her dream trip to Paris, all expenses paid. Her family could never have afforded such a vacation otherwise.

But when Karen, a single mom, got the news, she was more frightened than excited. Like many people, Johnson thought the Foundation only sent terminally ill children on trips. “That’s the biggest misconception we face,” said Make a Wish Foundation spokesman Jim Maggio.

In fact, any child between 2 ½ and 18 suffering from a life-threatening illness is eligible. They can self nominate or be nominated by a parent or doctor. Many of these kids, like Shelby and Iowa college student John McDonald, go on to lead healthy, productive lives. “The best part was seeing all the support – how so many people I didn’t know really cared about me,” says McDonald.

Since the Foundation started 25 years ago, inspired by a local Arizona effort to make a dying seven-year-old’s dream of becoming a police officer come true, the organization has grown to a network of 25,000 volunteers with chapters in every state. It’s granted 140,000 wishes to children. Nearly 60 percent of them involve some sort of travel for a wish child and their family, Maggio said. (See www.wish.org)

Certainly a lot of kids want to go to theme parks. There’s an entire non-profit village in Orlando, Give Kids the World, that hosts ill youngsters and their families, providing the medical support they may need. (See www.gktw.org)

But many youngsters have different dreams. Trips have ranged from fishing in Alaska, to riding horses on a Montana Ranch, to the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Indianapolis 500. “To be able to get away from home and do new things and have that experience, that means a lot for a sick kid,” explains Shelby.

These families don’t have to sweat the travel details, either. The local Make a Wish Foundation arranges everything, even money for meals and souvenirs – after consulting with the wish kids, of course.

Perhaps most important, in the months leading up to the trip, these kids and their families suddenly have a lot more to look forward to than painful treatments and hospital stays. “When you’re going through all that, it’s tough to stay optimistic,” says McDonald. “This helped a lot.”

By the time Shelby’s whirlwind week in Paris was over, she was a different child, her mom said. “It’s sounds like a cliché, but she got her hope back,” her Mom, Karen, explains.

“I started to think about all the things I still could do and enjoy,” Shelby says. That included painting with special easier-to-grip brushes. Shelby decided to use her art to help other sick kids travel.

Incredibly, in the three years since her Make A Wish journey, Shelby has raised more than $20,000 selling her paintings, to fund Make A Wish trips for four other Tennessee children. Shelby, meanwhile, plans to study art in college. She’s counting on getting back to Paris some day.

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