November 10th, Give Haiti Hope at UT had their Breaking Ground at South Bound benefit concert in the Old City of downtown Knoxville. Club members worked hard to put on a great show. Students chose the opening local band: The Mountain Kings, whose loud and upbeat music was followed by the softer tones of The Sweetest Sleep. The Sweetest Sleep
Headliner Graham Colton
The GHH club originally intended on partnering with other campus groups but in the end, planned the event totally themselves. The club members, who ran around in blue t-shirts bearing details of the event, worked in every aspect of the concert: manning the merchandise table, collecting tickets, introducing the artists, and helping to break down everything afterwards. It was good to see so many blue shirts and know that these college students had taken time to put together this concert for the benefit of children in Haiti.
Students put in a lot of work before the show as well. The week of the show, students sold tickets by manning a table on Pedestrian Walkway. They also created an online option for ticket purchasing. (The Price: $7-$10 was an unbelievable considering the impressive line-up!) They made a grabbing press release to advertise the event and the students’ efforts even caught UTK DailyBeacon’s attention, landing an article featuring the concert.
The founding officers of Give Haiti Hope enjoying the show!
In the end the concert raised around $600, enough to fund six student’s educational fees for a year. The group plans on making the concert an annual event, so make sure to be on the lookout next fall! If you weren’t able to attend this time then go check out the GHH facebook page for some great pictures!
Meeting Dr. Paul Farmer
If you don’t know who Dr. Farmer is, I suggest picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains” biographical account of Dr. Farmer’s work in Haiti and the development of Partners In Health (PIH), an international organization that fights to bring medical care to the world’s poorest for free. Watch this 60 Minutes report for more: http://www.pih.org/pages/what-we-do/
A lot of the Haitians that the HOP works with are also employed by PIH. In October, PIH employees attended the secondary school ground-breaking and Deacon Ben Johnston met with PIH’s Amanda Schwartz to exchange ideas on future project collaborations. It was then that he was invited to attend the PIH Symposium in Boston, which he did in September, where the Haiti Outreach Program(HOP) was mentioned by keynote speakers Joia Mukerjhee (Cheif Medical PIH Officer) and Ophelia Dahl (PIH Executive Director) as a valuable partner. The symposium can be viewed freely here: http://www.pih.org/symposium
When asked how this partnership came about, Deacon Ben told me that when the program first began he asked the Haitian government to partner with HOP and in return received a letter from the Ministry of Heath which listed Dr. Paul Farmer as the Medical Director. Deacon Ben then researched this non-Haitian name and found out about PIH and the hospital Dr. Farmer had in Cange, called Zamni Lasante. This clinic was much closer to Boucan Care than the hospital to which they had previously been referring patients. Emails were sent to Dr. Farmer with no reply until patients started arriving at Zamni Lasante with slips of paper referring them to Dr. Farmer. When asked who they were sent by, patients spoke of the “blond from Knoxville,” or as we know him, Dr. Mire. Dr. Farmer then found Deacon Ben’s emails and the partnership began.
Dr. Mire and a team just went down for a week to work in Boucan Carre and Bouli. The board has been working on plans for the construction of a new clinic there as well which is now under construction and should be finished by February. That group returned on Thursday and Deacon Ben returned from a separate trip yesterday. Check back soon for news, reports, and photos from their trips!