Campus News

UK Student-athletes Give, Gain Much in Ethiopia

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 16, 2011) − Recently, members of the University of Kentucky athletics family began their summer vacation with a service trip to Ethiopia.  UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart and wife Connie, Head Football Coach Joker Phillips and wife Leslie, Associate Athletics Director Jason Schlafer and football players Stuart Hines and Danny Trevathan spent a week delivering food and providing other means of support to members of several villages in Ethiopia.

Everyone who attended the May trip, particularly Hines and Trevathan, came back from Africa with a different view of the world.  They talked about the love, gratefulness and warmth the people of Ethiopia showed them despite a poverty-stricken, disease-riddled country that features dilapidated living environments, homeless children, bad drinking water, scarce food, rolling blackouts and a life expectancy of less than 50.  Hines expressed a new appreciation for life in America and the privileges of being at UK.

"We are here playing football and on scholarship, have our school paid for and have a roof over our head and food provided for us," Hines said. "It is not like that at all in some places. There are 500,000 kids that live on the street in Ethiopia. That could have easily been one of us that ended up in a life like that, but we are blessed enough to have the opportunities that we have had."

Schlafer, associate athletics director for marketing and licensing , who has an adopted child from Ethiopia, concieved the trip during the 2010 Gam3Day Ready Tour.

The idea behind the original Gam3Day Ready Tour, a five-city trip last summer through the state of Kentucky, was to show kids across the state the importance of getting out in their communities and staying active. During each stop, Phillips and the UK marketing team hosted a free mini-combine at local parks for boys and girls eighth grade and under to teach them more about the game of football.

On the way back from one of the stops, as Phillips and the staff rested, they decided to watch "Invictus," a film that chronicles Nelson Mandela's unification of his apartheid-torn country of South Africa through the enlistment of a national rugby team. The Gam3Day Ready staff watched closely as in the movie, the 1995 South African rugby team went into the communities of South Africa to promote a foreign game and inspire unification.

As Schlafer observed the film, he realized they were doing something of similar motivation and wanted to take the tour to the next step. Eventually, it evolved into the trip to Ethiopia, a summer mission that Barnhart hopes to expand into an annual program that could feature up to eight student-athletes from UK's various sports.

Barnhart said the trip is not a recruiting ploy, but an educational experience. 

"Our goal, as a department, is to educate," Barnhart said. "We get to play a lot of games and do a lot of things that you guys count in W's and L's, but at the end of the day, our job is to educate young people and to expand their horizons and their minds and their hearts. This is part of that process."

While learning about Ethiopia, its people and their struggles, Hines and Trevathan gained lessons they said they could apply to their upcoming football season. Hines said he learned about leadership through local village leaders, and Trevathan gained a better understanding of unification and coming together after watching the people of Ethiopia work together through near-unbearable conditions.

Their most rewarding work might just be playing soccer with the kids or teaching them football. Many of the kids were diseased and hadn't bathed, but Hines tickled them and Trevathan hugged them anyway.

They did not flinch, Phillips said, in relating with kids they could barely understand. They seemed to communicate with each other through the games they played.  Phillips said he learned that Hines has a great sense of humor and a wonderful personality. Trevathan, he found out, "is a hugger." And of Barnhart and his wife, Connie, Phillips learned they don't mind getting their hands dirty to help out others.

Two experiences may live with Trevathan for the rest of his life.  The first was when he watched a 35-year-old woman die right before his eyes.  The UK linebacker was delivering food in a tent no bigger than a trailer when someone asked him to visit with a woman who was shaking in a corner of the tent.

"I felt like something was wrong right then and there," Trevathan said. "At first I was taken back and then I looked up and she looked right at me and looked like she wanted my hand. I gave her my hand and she said thank you. After that, I turned around and shook my head and was walking back and someone told me that they thought that was her last breath.

She found time to say thank you to me with her last breath and that is what touched me the most. We live good every day and sometimes we can't find the time to say thank you, but she did."

The second experience was during an encounter the UK group had with an HIV positive woman.  Phillips and Barnhart refused to leave until they could find enough money to buy formula to feed her new baby.  The woman faced the decision of feeding her HIV negative baby her breast milk, possibly passing on the disease to her child, or not feed the baby at all.

"That, in a nutshell, shows you what kind of people they (Phillips and Barnhart) are and what it was like to be around them," Hines said. "They are extremely caring and generous."

For those who want to help but don't know how, Barnhart said there are two ways to lend support.  First, people can donate directly to the people of Ethiopia through various organizations.  Second, people can help fund projects like the May Ethiopia service trip.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is one of the agencies that helps to coordinate aid to Ethiopia.  The USAID website is www.usaid.gov.

MEDIA CONTACT: Alicia Brab or Carl Nathe, (859) 257-3200