2 Harvard students warm with ice tour

Donate 70 tickets to mothers, youths

Jahsiem Guerrier (left), 2, Imalay Checo, 4, and Ivette Checo, 3, at Casa Nueva Vida yesterday. The Jamaica Plain shelter houses homeless single mothers and children. Nineteen families live in the shelter. (Dominic Chavez/Globe Staff)

Two Harvard students made the day of a lot of single mothers and their children with a surprise donation of 70 tickets to a performance yesterday of "High School Musical: The Ice Tour."

Tyler Bosmeny and Roger Lee are two founders of PaperG, a website launched Feb. 1 to connect advertisers with local websites. One of the site's first customers was Disney, which was looking to promote its traveling ice show.

Disney officials, impressed by PaperG, gave Bosmeny and Lee 70 tickets for prime seats - a $2,000 value.

"We realized we didn't know what to do with them, and it would be a lot of work to sell them," said Bosmeny, a junior studying applied mathematics. "We thought it was a pretty easy opportunity to help out someone who wouldn't normally get a chance to go."

The two searched online and found Casa Nueva Vida, a Jamaica Plain shelter that houses homeless single mothers and children. Casa Nueva Vida, Spanish for "house of new life," gives women and their families a long-term place to live. Nineteen families live in the shelter.

"This is a house," said Doris Gaitan, the shelter's director of educational programs. "[At] regular shelters you feel like everyone is in a different place. What we try to encourage is that we are a family."

Women in the house cook and clean together, and take computer and English as a Second Language classes.

Most of the children had seen "High School Musical" on television, and shortly before yesterday's performance were excited to see the ice show.

"I think it's going to be cool," said Jonathan Lopez, 11, who has lived in the shelter with his mother, brother, and two sisters since April. "It's gonna be skating on ice, and I never saw 'High School Musical' like that before."

"These kids can't always do this kind of stuff, because of money," Gaitan said. "I think anything we can provide for the families is great."

Bosmeny and Lee also arranged for a bus to take the mothers and their children to the TD BankNorth Garden, where the show was held.