By Gina Jordan
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wfsu/local-wfsu-884838.mp3
Tallahassee, FL – A Tallahassee woman who has raised money for a music camp in Haiti for the last decade is shifting gears this year, as her efforts have taken on new urgency.
It started one summer ten years ago, on a random trip to Haiti with some fellow music teachers. Janet Ray spent time working at a music camp run by American volunteers at the Christian University of Northern Haiti.
"I just got hooked, wonderful students, very talented, and they were so grateful and so inspired. They inspired me, and so I began to return."
The students were mostly young men, and they were given responsibilities at camp, like locking up when class was over. This was a big deal because they had never even seen a key. At a reunion last summer in Haiti, ten men from that first camp who went on to receive advanced degrees in the U-S told Ray what those life lessons meant to them.
"That really impressed me when they said to me, Miss Janet, we remember when we got our very first idea/inkling/motivation of what it means to learn and to be a leader."
Ray wanted to keep the music camp going. So she got some friends together, and they held a fundraiser. Those efforts have grown over the years, and the money has enabled them to add instruments and expand a classroom.
"There are usually three to four-hundred kids and young people there now. It's a lot, and they have to save the entire year to get there, and when they get there, they bring their own food, which is usually a little napkin full of rice. We give them one meal a day. That's all they get, because they have saved everything they had just to get there."
Younger students have started attending, which Ray proudly notes is another generation whose interest in learning can be stoked through music. Ray will hold her annual fundraiser this weekend, but this time, things are different. A lot of her former students contacted her after the earthquake, and told her they lost family members.
"The circumstances in Haiti were dire, and I have seen much of this poverty in my short trips there. So after the earthquake, honestly, I can't imagine how much worse it could be, but it is."
So this year, rather than raise money for the music camp, Ray and her friends from First Baptist Church of Tallahassee will do what they can to get basic supplies like food and medicine to the university. Instead of selling the usual trinkets and artwork from Haiti at the fundraiser, they will focus on collecting monetary donations for people Ray has always found to be joyous, in spite of being so impoverished.
"It's inspiring to me to see how they can be happy and have curiosity and interest in life around them and small things and find great happiness in that. We don't get that in our culture, and it's an inspiration to be around them."
Ray says she knows she can't change a country, but she feels like she has helped make a difference in one little corner of the world.
For more information about the fundraiser, copy and paste the link below. You'll see pictures from the music camp in Haiti and find out how you can help.
http://www.fbctlh.org/templates/System/details.asp?id=46231&PID=753992