'Makes my heart glow': Fair Haven girl knows all too well how to help kids with cancer

The bad news came right before Christmas, making a tough situation even harder. That’s when Fair Haven resident Pia Kappy found out her 6-year-old daughter Freja had leukemia.

So Freja entered Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and spent Christmas 2019 undergoing treatment there. Then something unexpected happened.

“Despite what seemed like our lives falling apart, our experience in the hospital was very special to us,” Kappy said.

The child-life program, MSK Kids, made the days as entertaining as possible for Freja through games and donated toys.

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Later, as Freja recovered, she and her family sought to pay that kindness forward, organizing their own toy drive and selling beaded bracelets on the beach to benefit the child-life program. So touched were the folks at MSK Kids that they nominated Freja to be one of two ambassadors for Stop & Shop’s annual Help Cure Childhood Cancer Campaign.

Through April 2, Freja's photo appears at the checkout counter and elsewhere in 200 Stop & Shop stores throughout the tri-state area, encouraging shoppers to round up their change to donate a buck or two for childhood cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

“It makes me feel good because maybe people can be inspired,” said Freja, who is now 9. “And I love to help other kids, too.”

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'We understand what you're going through'

As Kappy put it, “For a child, spending hours and hours in the hospital is boring.”

To alleviate the tedium for those who came after her, Freja and her family rounded up several hundred toys during the 2021 and 2022 holiday seasons.

“From a mother’s perspective, just to have a half-hour experience of playing with the toy is so valuable while you’re sitting there at the hospital,” Kappy said. "We thought this would be a really nice way for us to give back, especially to the kids at the hospital and say, ‘We understand what you’re going through.’”

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