codeigniter - Trouble installing PHP-Payments

I recently installed Sparks (package manager for CI) and now I'm trying to install a spark named: codeigniter-payments found at http://getsparks.org/packages/codeigniter-payments/versions/HEAD/show

Looking into the spark folders and some reading on the site, it seems this spark has a dependency on PHPPayments found at http://payments.calvinfroedge.com/index.html

When I try to run my code I run into this error message:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STATIC in /home/a3374546/public_html/codeigniter/sparks/codeigniter-payments/0.1.4/src/php-payments/lib/payment_utility.php on line 21

This error points to these lines of code:

//Ignore classes that should be ignored
foreach(static::$autoload_ignore as $ignore)
{
    if(strpos($class, $ignore) !== false) return;
}

In addition, I had to change some file references such as:

dirname(__DIR__) 

to

dirname(dirname(__FILE__))

I want to ask is there a dependency for PHPPayments and by extension codeigniter-payments to have PHP 5.3.X before it will work? On a related note, is it possible to make changes to make it work with 5.2.X .

According to 000webhost.com (my hosting), the version they run is: PHP Version 5.2.17

Edit: Added System info:

Apache ver. 2.2.19 (Unix)

PHP version 5.2.* -> As mentioned above, php info states version 5.2.17

MySQL ver. 5.1

Codeigniter version: 2.1.0

Codeigniter Payments: 0.1.4

PHP payments: 67202cf *not sure if this is a version # but this was the # at the end of the zip file