By MIKE JAMES - The Independent
WURTLAND — Nicky Reeves wants to cry when he sees pictures of children in Haiti outside their ruined homes.
Noah Bailey wants to send a billion dollars to the earthquake-ravaged island nation.
His bank account isn’t quite that fat, but since one of their teachers returned from a trip to help with disaster relief in Haiti, Noah and most of the other students at Wurtland Middle School are sending more than a few dollars for earthquake relief.
They have started a donation drive and challenged other school districts to chip in. The challenge has been successful: Russell, Boyd County and Ashland all are participating.
“Seeing the kids’ faces makes you want to give at least a billion dollars, but you give what you can,” Noah said.
“It’s really bad. It’s worse than I thought it would be. It makes you want to cry,” Nicky said.
The pictures that make him and his classmates so sad were taken by sixth-grade social studies teacher David Stuart, who returned late last week from 10 days of relief work in Haiti. Stuart, whose parents operate a mission and orphanage near the southern seacoast, unloaded freighters, guided planes and helicopters at the airport, and ferried supplies to the mission.
His parents’ mission, Hands and Feet Children’s Village, was mostly undamaged, but trips inland to a sister mission took him through towns and over roads that were damaged almost beyond repair.
His photos show roads blocked by room-sized boulders and riddled with cracks so deep that locals stuck in tree branches to mark them. They show houses and public buildings shattered into rubble and makeshift roadside vegetable stands put up by islanders trying to get back to work.
There are photos of Stuart and local workers slinging medical supplies in a human chain from freighter to truck, and pictures of curious children, many of them left homeless by the earthquake.
While he was gone, staffers at Wurtland mulled over ideas for helping the cause, said Emily Stephenson, coordinator of the school’s family resource center. The donation drive caught on immediately with the students, who have been more than generous, she said.
The school’s Community Problem Solving team members took on the job of coordinating the drive at Wurtland. They have been setting up a table during the lunch period with a jar for donations, said team member Emily Munn, a seventh-grader.
They took in $72 Tuesday and $96 Wednesday, most of it from students.
It wasn’t just nickels and dimes, Emily said. She saw a lot of folding money, ones and fives, in the jar.
Hearing about the disaster from one of their own teachers puts it in sharp relief. “It’s really devastating. We talk about it in class,” Emily said.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.
