For William “Bill” Whitehill, to give is a gift within itself, and ever since visiting Jamaica in fall 2006, he’s been on a self-appointed mission to give all he can to a special group of youngsters.
An associate professor of health and human performance at MTSU, Whitehill said he stumbled across the children and their plight during a happenstance visit to the John Rollins Success Primary School in Montego Bay, where he was astounded to find a bookless library.
“They had absolutely no books in the school?and it had been open for 18 months at that time,” he recalled, still sounding surprised about the find.
Since then, he’s worked with the school’s principal, Yvonne Miller-Wisdom, to help fill the library’s shelves. Immediately upon his return from Jamaica, Whitehill quickly gathered and shipped 50 pounds of books to the school. Not long thereafter, he said, he collected and shipped another 1,225-plus pounds of books, with help from MTSU community members who learned of his service project. Then, with additional donations from the campus and local community, Whitehill was able to collect another 2,700 pounds of books, including Braille Bibles, to send to the school.
“I appreciate so much the effort put into ensuring that my students are literate,” Miller-Wisdom said in a recent interview. “There are some students who are not able to read, and I know that the books will be used to motivated these students to read.
“We will also place some of the books in each classroom so that the students will have easy access to their own class library,” Miller-Wisdom explained, “(but the) majority of the books will be placed in the school library.”
Books are just the beginning of the children’s basic school needs, said Whitehill, who’s also hoping to assist the school in acquiring sports and music equipment, educational software, and perhaps even computers.
He’s tried to secure used sports equipment from the university to donate, but has learned that National Collegiate Athletic Association rules prohibit him from donating such items to the Jamaican school.
“It’s an NCAA violation to give away things to an elementary school that’s not within 35 miles of your university,” he explained, “so we won’t be doing that so [MTSU] stays in compliance with those regulations.”
Whitehill came across the nonprofit group Food for the Poor when he began searching for an organization to help him ship materials to the school, and, currently, the group will deliver shipments directly to the Montego Bay elementary free of charge once they reach its Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., location. As for getting the donations from Murfreesboro to Florida, Whitehill concedes that to date he’s spent about $1,000 from his own pocket to ship some 4,000 pounds of books to Jamaica.
“Morally, it’s just the right thing to do,” Whitehill said. “They have a need, and we are a land of plenty.”
To learn more about Whitehill’s donation efforts on behalf of the school, visit mtsu.edu/~proffice/ MT_Record/mtr0706_June07/MTR0707-YouTube-Jamaica.html
