Whiz Kid: St. Edward Senior Preps for Nutritious Return to El Salvador

Last summer, Keven Lenahan boarded a plane bound for El Salvador with little more than a burlap sack of vitamins slung over one shoulder, the crescendo of a year’s worth of work at last within reach.

More than a dozen of his friends joined Lenahan for that journey from Cleveland to Central America, each of them with a burlap sack of their own filled with iron and iodine and folic acid in perfect doses. But none of them would have been there without his vision and drive, without his will to do.

Lenahan, a senior at , had wanted to design and deliver an international service project for years, but had never narrowed his vision until late 2009, shortly after he talked with Mary Stevenson, the director of a local nonprofit that works to improve the lives of hundreds of orphans in El Salvador. Lenahan asked what they needed. Books? Computers? No, Stevenson said, what they really needed was something much simpler.

Vitamins.

The children Stevenson and her nonprofit, COAR, worked with most closely were not hungry, but they were malnourished. Their diets lacked the vitamins so basic to the Western diet, which led to blindness, mental illnesses, even infertility. So Lenahan set out to determine the best way to collect vitamins and deliver them to a small country thousands of miles from Lakewood. He founded a company, SalvaVita, sent out press releases and advertised, worked with local companies and donors and, in just a few months, collected nearly 1 million vitamins.

“There are literally warehouses and warehouses of these types of vitamins that can’t be sold because of FDA rules,” Lenahan said. “Maybe the packaging was broken on one pallet, or a pallet was kept at the wrong temperature for a couple of hours. There are a lot of reasons that they don’t pass regulation, and they just have to be donated. If you make the effort to get them, you can get them. 

“The harder part is getting them down to the country.”

Because shipping is expensive and unloading the boxes is next to impossible without a reliable ground crew in Central America, Lenahan opted to carry as many of the vitamins as possible, hence the burlap sacks. More vitamins arrived later last year, and still more arrived last month. Lenahan has a return trip scheduled to start with the first flight out of Cleveland the day after he graduates in late May.

Until then, Lenahan will be busy. He's finishing a load of Advanced Placement courses and just picked Stanford, where he will study electrical engineering, over MIT.

The rest of Lenahan’s resume reads like a laundry list of lofty accomplishments, just one or two of them enough for most folks: Four falls of varsity cross country, four springs of theater performances, three years as an editor for the student newspaper, two years as class president and another as executive student council president, two years in the air as a private pilot and a summer as an intern at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, where he worked with photovoltaic power systems and conducted a two-month study of the atmosphere’s ozone levels. Oh, and he is also one of four finalists for the St. Edward Man of the Year Award, the highest honor for a student at the school.

Win or lose, Lenahan will be back in Central America this summer, then back at the NASA Glenn Research Center, then off to one of the coasts to study engineering. He wants to continue his work with SalvaVita and, soon, manage to tie it all together.

“In five years, 10 years, I would ultimately like to work on alternative energy systems in third-world countries, blending an engineering and a business background, but in a nonprofit, service-oriented field,” he said. “I’m not really sure how that might change based on where I wind up next year, but that’s the vision.”

Every week, Lakewood Patch will honor a Whiz Kid in our community. Don't forget to submit your own nominations for outstanding kids who make Eagle Scout, aced a hard test, or led their CYO team to victory. Email colin.mcewen@patch.com with your nominations or enter them in the comments below.