This tween could have met Jalen Hurts. Instead, he used his Make-A-Wish to host a carnival for a homeless shelter

On a mild April day, 12-year-old Sam Okyere reviewed his wish list with his mom during their drive to the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s Bala Cynwyd office.

First choice: Legoland and Disney World.

Second choice: meeting Eagles Jalen Hurts and Saquon Barkley.

Third choice: hanging out with Philly rapper Lil Uzi Vert.

But when Sam, his mom, and two members of the Make-A-Wish crew squeezed into the office’s tiny Lego-themed room for the official discussion, something different flashed to mind.

“I want to help the homeless,” Sam told them.

Sam has sickle cell disease. He’s endured a lifetime in and out of hematologists’ offices, white-knuckling through blood transfusions and bursting into hospitals when “pain crises,” agonizing sensations caused by disruption in the blood flow, tore through his body. This was his chance to do one completely selfish thing, and he chose to be selfless.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Maude Gambrah, Sam’s mom, asked as she started the car to drive them home to Drexel Hill. She knew Sam had a soft spot for homeless people. He was always encouraging her to give money to panhandlers around Philly. But this was his only wish.

“Yeah, Mommy,” he responded. “This is what I want to do.”

Make-A-Wish settled on Families Forward Philadelphia, a homeless shelter in West Philly, as the recipient of Sam’s wish and hosted a monthlong donation drive for the facility leading up to “Sam’s Perfect Day” last month. The carnival-style extravaganza on the shelter’s front lawn, attended by dozens of families experiencing homelessness as well as Sam and his family, featured Lego displays, a petting zoo, a Lego-inspired bounce castle, and water ice provided by Sam’s family’s Southwest Philly water ice business, Willkay’s.

Word of the wish quickly spread around the office of Make-A-Wish Philadelphia, Delaware, & Susquehanna Valley following the April meeting. Anika Goyal, one of the staffers responsible for carrying out wishes, knew this one had to be hers.

The chapter, which grants about 335 wishes a year, regularly fulfills shopping sprees, vacations to Disney World, and room makeovers, but it rarely gets one like Sam’s, Goyal said.

So Goyal got to work. Sam emphasized that helping homeless children, specifically, was important to him, so Goyal selected Families Forward as the beneficiary shelter because it emphasizes keeping families intact during their stays.

She reached out to small businesses and nonprofits — as many as she could find that also had Make-A-Wish connections. Oshun Family Center, which Goyal asked to host a table on Black maternal health and to distribute childcare kits, was founded by a mom of a Make-A-Wish recipient. Jam-Rock Kitchen, a local Jamaican restaurant owned by another Make-A-Wish family, slathered up their jerk chicken and spiced up their rice and peas for the big day.

Goyal also looped in staff at the King of Prussia Lego store, a former contestant on the reality TV competition series LEGO Masters, and Swoop, the Philadelphia Eagles mascot, to make the event quintessentially Sam.

“It’s not about him,” Goyal said. “But it is about him.”

As Goyal and the Make-A-Wish team prepared the logistics, Sam contended with a life-altering decision. Sickle cell can be treated through a bone marrow transplant. The ideal donor is a sibling who is a match. Will Okyere, Sam’s 25-year-old brother, was. So Sam and his family scheduled a transplant for the end of August. The process starts with chemotherapy and ends with in-home isolation for several months, requiring Sam to miss most of his seventh-grade year with his friends.

“It’s a bummer,” Sam said. “But, it’s like, anything to get me better.”

“I just want to get sickle cell over and done with,” he added.

While sickle cell disease is not inherently fatal, it can increase the risk of life-threatening infections, acute chest syndrome, stroke, and chronic organ damage, particularly without medications or interventions such as a bone marrow transplant or gene therapy.

Cynthia Norris, Sam’s attending hematologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who referred Sam for the wish, said he stood out among all her eligible patients because he has the most severe variation of the disease and has had a number of complications. His grace and thoughtfulness, she said, also set him apart.

“He’s just a very special young man,” Norris said. “He has so much empathy.”

After months of waiting and preparation, Sam’s Perfect Day finally arrived.

Shiny new yellow, red, and blue soccer balls and Hula-Hoops lined the main hall of the Families Forward office building. Tubs along the mirroring wall brimmed with sunscreen bottles, toothbrushes, and soap. A giant poster sandwiched in the middle bore Sam’s likeness in Lego form — tiny Afro and all.

Families Forward could never have afforded this bounty on its own, said Jessica Main, the nonprofit’s chief development officer. Grant money the shelter receives is often tied to specific types of services like mental health and education. Its budget for toys and recreational materials is around $3,000 annually, Main estimated. That would probably barely cover the glimmering new basketball hoop and sports equipment Sam’s donation drive brought in.

Sam nestled into a blue canvas chair in the petting zoo as two goats nibbled food out of Dixie cups he held in each hand.

“I’m naming this one Ashton,” Sam announced to no one in particular, looking at a brown and white goat.

“Food! Anybody want food,” he shouted to the tiny goats (one wearing a feathered bowler hat), bunnies, and one black pig that dragged its rotund paunch on the ground wherever it went.

“Zane, Kai, Lloyd,” he said, pointing at two goats and then the pig, naming all after characters on his favorite show Ninjago, which the uninitiated will be unsurprised to learn is a show about Legos.

Soon a 3-year-old named Saga, wearing a white dress smattered with images of heart-shaped lollipops, entered the petting zoo enclosure, mouth agape as she stood eye-to-eye with the recently named Ashton the goat and gently patted the silver nubs on either side of its bony head. This was her first experience with farm animals.

Her mother, Quechera Jowers, 32, followed closely. The pair have lived at the shelter for about four months.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s a little nostalgic,” Jowers said, taking in the carnival sights as they waited in line for cotton candy, which, based on crystallized red formations encrusted around Saga’s mouth, it appeared she’d already indulged in.

Throughout the afternoon, gleaming toddler cheeks transformed into butterfly wings, kitten whiskers, and dragon scales with face paint. Pink and purple beads were strung into friendship bracelets, and technicolor swimsuits (each child got one through Sam’s donation drive) grew soaked from a sprinkler raining down on the kids as they descended an inflatable slide adjoined to the bounce castle. Navigating the pipe system of the old converted asylum-turned-shelter facility was the challenge of the morning, Main said.

Beyoncé blared from a portable DJ booth, chubby fingers grasped balloons on strings and absentmindedly released them into the stratosphere, and a topless toddler with wild curls boogied near the mouth of a bubble machine, a diaper band peeking out from his khaki shorts.

Sam, meanwhile, alternated between the Lego games, petting zoo, and basketball station.

After discreetly lowering his game controller in the middle of a Lego joust, allowing a friend to overtake his spacecraft and win the game, Sam sauntered over to the goats situated in a kennel in the back of a truck to bid them farewell.

“I don’t want them to leave,” he mused as he delicately scratched a tan one on the chin and, with an understated graciousness rare to find in adults, let alone children, allowed the petting zoo staff to take them away.

As the afternoon drew to a close, Sam settled into a chair in the hallway full of donations and futzed with a small Lego vehicle. An event organizer informed him that the Lego store employees offered to gift him all the leftover toys. Sam politely declined and requested they instead be given to the kids at the shelter.

Asked in the final moments what could have made Sam’s Perfect Day more perfect, he contemplated.

“Nothing,” he resolved.

Nothing at all.