By Abby Patkin and Dani Davidoff
It is hardly out of the ordinary for a group of South students to debate health care. Debating health care in French class, however, is another story.
In Cathy Hammond’s French 4 class, students do just that, but have also taken it one step further, organizing a fundraising campaign for Partners in Health, a non-profit organization that provides access to free health care for Haitians.
The student-led group, Hammond’s Helpers Help Haiti, has been working for more than three months now to raise money for Partners in Health, after watching videos about the work done by Paul Farmer, a doctor who founded the organization.
“This is an organization that I’ve been connected to and have felt passionately about for many years,” Hammond said. “Because we studied…health care in Haiti and Paul Farmer’s belief that healthcare is a human right, my students felt strongly that this was an organization they wanted to help.”
Partners in Health has been providing healthcare to the world’s poor since 1987 when it was founded by a group of doctors and philanthropists, and has since branched out from Haiti and into other impoverished regions of the world.
The students began by brainstorming ideas for possible fundraisers. They have already held a bake sale, placed collection jars throughout the building, and sold candy grams—boxes of candy hearts delivered to recipients in homeroom—just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Hammond said the group raised nearly $400 in the first three days of fundraising alone.
Students said the collective effort has positively affected the nature of their group.
“Doing this as [a] class makes [us] a stronger community while helping others,” junior Jelena Kupkevic said.
“We’re an eccentric group of people who have grown really close this past year,” junior Toni Monge said. “We all want to… join together to help those in need.”
Students said that in addition to building their classroom community, the initiative has also made their French class itself a unique learning experience.
“[Working on this project] makes French class much more interesting—[we are doing] something other than just learning vocabulary and conjugations–while helping others,” Kupkevic said.
Students said that as a result of the project, they have also become more conscious of the luxuries afforded to them in the United States that Haitians and citizens of other second- and third-world nations do not have access to.
“It’s a great opportunity to help people that are in less fortunate situations than ours,” junior Daniel Friedman said. “I think it’s important to be able to realize that there are people in our world who are less fortunate than us, and that they deserve the same amount of health care and rights as we have.”
“[Partners in Health] is a really great organization that takes the abundance of resources we in the [United States] are blessed with, and helps spread them around the world,” junior Liana Butchard said. “I also am really drawn to how devoted and selfless Paul [Farmer] and his colleagues are in terms of giving up everything to help these people.”
Students said they will continue to raise money for Partners in Health, accepting any donations made to the organization.
“I am so proud of the hard work [my students] have put in in the limited amount of time that we allowed ourselves to meet our goal of raising $1,000,” Hammond said.
