LAGUNA NIGUEL – At age 9, Micah Slentz already has fulfilled one of his dreams: helping underprivileged children in Africa. Now he’s thinking even bigger and looking to retired soccer star David Beckham to help take his efforts worldwide.

The idea behind Micah’s project was simple enough: Find, collect and distribute used Lego bricks to children in Africa. His motivation also was natural to him. Micah, a fourth-grader at Viejo Elementary School and an avid Lego builder, couldn’t imagine a kid not having access to the toy bricks.

And since Lego bricks are a rarity in a continent that includes some of the most poverty-stricken nations in the world, Micah figured that bringing children there the joy of playing with the toys, which also foster creativity and build critical-thinking skills in young kids, would be a big deal.

How it all started

The idea for Lego Africa started when Micah, then 6 years old, and his father, Sequoia Slentz, went to a Lego store at The Shops at Mission Viejo. Micah saw a huge set with hundreds of bricks. He told his father he had to have it.

“I wanted more toys, of course,” he said. “My dad said ‘no’ and said, ‘Children in other countries don’t have Legos at all.’”

Micah didn’t forget that conversation. The next time he and his father were at the Lego store, he tried again. This time the request wasn’t for himself. Rather, he asked if they could buy a Lego set to send to children in Africa. His idea: Give it to the mailman to send over.

“It’s one of the poorest continents in the world,” Micah explained, sitting in his living room eating Frosted Flakes with chocolate milk. “They don’t have a lot of toys. These kids are so poor, they actually live at school and only see their parents a couple of times a year. I couldn’t imagine that.”

Sequoia Slentz smiles when he remembers the initial conversations with his son.

“I just laughed and said they would probably rather have food,” he recalls.

But he, too, didn’t forget that conversation or the idea. He remembered his love for Legos as a child. He was reminded daily of how much the toy meant to Micah and Micah’s younger brother, Logan. He’d pick them up from school and watch them race into the house just to start working on designs they’d thought up during the day.

Sequoia Slentz remembered how some of the Legos his boys played with came as hand-me-downs from a friend whose son had outgrown them. And, as a concert promoter for entertainer Howard Stern’s shows, Sequoia Slentz recalled another comedian talking about collecting sports equipment in the U.S. and taking it to children in Africa.

Just for grins, he asked the guy what he thought kids in Africa would think of Lego bricks.

“He said they would freak out,” Sequoia Slentz remembered. “If I had Legos, I’d send them there, he told me.”

So Sequoia Slentz brainstormed with Micah on how to collect used Legos. People were always hitting him up for backstage passes for the Stern show. His idea: Bring used Legos, get free backstage passes. Before he knew it, people were lined up with bags and bags of Legos.

Dream turns to reality

Sequoia Slentz told Micah his idea.

“Micah was just frothing at the mouth, jumping up and down, saying, ‘We’re going to change lives,’” Sequoia Slentz said, grinning.

Then one day, Micah walked into his father’s office and saw bags and bags of Lego bricks lined up against the wall.

“I felt excited and confused,” Micah said. “We kept collecting them. My mom posted on Facebook and it just began spreading.”

Soon, they had hundreds of thousands of Legos. Now, it was: “How do we get them to Africa?”

Sequoia Slentz contacted the charity Child Africa. He wrote a letter about the used Legos and was contacted by Rosemary Soylander, a Norwegian woman who was part of the group. She thought the idea was grand and offered to take the Legos to Africa on her next trip.

The next thing they knew, 80 pounds of Legos were heading to Child Africa Junior School in Uganda in 2013.

In return, Micah received a video showing kids at the school getting their Lego shipment.

“The kids were jumping for joy and they were all singing, ‘We love Legos’ as loud as they could,” Micah said. “I almost cried, it was beautiful.”

He posted that video on YouTube two weeks ago. In just the first day, it had 50,000 views.

Legos and Micah

Micah swears he remembers first playing with Lego Duplo. He was just 1 year old.

“I made all these staircases and towers,” he said. “At 2 years old, I remember really liking them. If I wanted to have a city, I could make one. If I wanted a pet shark, I could make it. When I was in second grade I was so excited to make the little schoolhouse from ‘Little House on the Prairie’ that I ran so fast I knocked down kids in my class just to get home.”

In recent years, there’s one Lego set that almost cost him his imagination, he says. He’s been building it for two years.

Now he’s hoping the kids in Africa will have that same excitement, imagination and joy. To that end, he’s keeping the collection going. And now at least a dozen neighborhood kids in Laguna Niguel are helping him.

Dax Sather, 8, is one of them.

“He’s the boy with the orange hair,” Micah said enthusiastically, pointing him out in a mound of Legos on his family’s living room floor. “He gets so into the Legos that he forgets about his own schedule.”

“You’ve got to go to music lessons at 4:45,” Micah says to Dax. “I’ve gotta keep him on schedule.”

Dax is pretty impressed with what Micah has done and is stoked to be part of the cause.

“I think it’s really awesome that my friend is doing things to help kids our age in another part of the world,” Dax said

Since the first shipment two years ago, Micah and his father have sent several more to Botswana and other schools in Uganda.

Ultimately, they hoped there would be enough Legos that kids from the school could take them home on breaks and share them with siblings and friends. But when Sequoia Slentz brought that idea up to the school’s administration, he was told that likely the Legos would be taken from the kids as something valuable.

That’s when Micah piped up.

“If they can use the Legos to trade for food, water and medicine, it’s kinda like we’re giving them money,” he said.

That’s when the light went on for Sequoia Slentz.

“I thought my son had stumbled upon one of the best ideas I’ve heard – redistribution of unperceived wealth,” he said. “Legos are the highest of luxury there. Legos are very expensive and nobody wants to throw them away. You can’t recycle them. they never go bad and they’re universally interchangeable. They’re not a toy. They’re a tool to develop a child’s mind.”

The David Beckham connection

Micah wants to get Beckham involved because the star soccer player is known to be a Lego fanatic and his popularity as a worldwide soccer star makes that a winning combination.

“I want him to be our spokesman,” Micah said. “I’m a kid, I can’t take a spokesman class. But he’s David Beckham and soccer is played around the world. Tons more people would help collect Legos if he told them to do it.”

Sequoia Slentz smiles when he thinks of how Micah’s dream began.

“When I was his age I probably dreamed of being cool and fitting in or some other shallow superficial thing,” he said. “For him to have a dream that is helping other people gives me hope for the future. For him to already be accomplishing his agenda tells me that he will soon have a new dream that will build on this one; he is the change this world needs.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or Twitter:@lagunaini