UT students traveled to Jamaica to provide medical assistance, tutoring, construction and abstinence training from March 14 to March 22.

Half of the team are members of Calvary Baptist Church ; the other half is from Baptist Collegiate Ministries.  The students flew into Montego Bay, Jamaica, on March 14, then traveled 30 minutes up the coast to the Trelawney Province where they divided into four teams.

One group of students assisted a physician, an optometrist and a registered nurse in providing medical care to the underprivileged. A triage was set up for basic screenings.  

“That’s a big ordeal with customs and those kinds of things,” said Joe Drummer, college pastor at Calvary Baptist Church.  “You have to have every piece of medicine counted: the cost of the medicine and the prescription. All that has to be cleared by customs in advance.”

Any time you go out of the country you realize how much you take for granted. Dylan Honeycutt
The logistics of travel can become a major problem. Physician David Rankin was detained in Knoxville the first four days due to a passport mix-up. He called the team every 30 minutes to write prescriptions for the medical clinic.  
    
“The first day we got there we were overwhelmed,” said Eric Thomas, member of the eye team. “People started lining up at 5 a.m. for the 10 a.m. clinic.”
    
The team held four medical clinics in four days. They saw more than 600 patients, but perhaps the direst medical emergency happened to a member of their own team. Zane Hartsell, a senior at the UT, had a bowel obstruction and had to be airlifted back to Tennessee for an operation.

A group of students also entered all age schools to tutor students, ranging from first to the ninth grade. Katie Fethe, a member of Calvary Baptist Church, was assigned to Duncan’s All Age School. She said she was overwhelmed by the large class size of 40 students supervised by one teacher. Despite the chaos, she formed relationships with many of the students.

“The team really got to teach and talk about the U.S. and our customs here,” Fethe said.

Another team traveled to the local high schools to give presentations and statistics promoting abstinence. They talked to classrooms ranging from 30 to 300 students. After a rousing rendition of Rocky Top and a few skits, they presented their facts. Teachers at the school said that people in Jamaica become sexually active at the age of 13 or 14. Dylan Honeycutt, a member of the abstinence team, talked with a 13-year-old girl who had been raped and contracted AIDS.

“Any time you go out of the country you realize how much you take for granted,” Honeycutt said.

A construction team restored buildings and homes that had been damaged by hurricane winds. They focused on the Nutshell Conference Center. They replaced all of the windows, painted the shutters and cleared an area for a vegetable garden. The construction team helped a Jamaican man build a home on his plot of land and gave him $200 to help support his family.  

A group of students also went to a deaf village. Four members of the team were deaf.  All seven translated and communicated with the community. They did construction on the village during the day and played with the children at night.

“It was really cool to play with them,” Kira Jones, member of Calvary, said. “Because they need that socialization to communicate with other children.”

The last team went to Granville girls orphanage. When the team arrived, they realized it was treated as an orphanage and a detention center. A fight broke out in the first hour they were there. Their primary job was to tutor the girls in reading, math and Jamaican history. Most of the girls were teenagers because they are seldom adopted, and some have HIV.  
 
“Jamaica is a great place because it’s readily accessible,” Drummer said.  “But once you get off the tourist path, you do see poverty. You do see people in need. You do see a different culture.”