Hannah Barker always knew she wanted to spend her life helping others less fortunate than herself, even aspiring to one day become a doctor and work in a developing country. Barker, who will be a junior this fall, has already begun to follow her dreams and has become an inspiration to her fellow classmates, and it all started with the help of an Aquinas College program.

During the summer after her freshman year at Aquinas, Barker participated in the Dominican Republic Service-Learning program offered through the campus ministry department. During the two-week trip, Barker and 11 other Aquinas students stayed in a small, rural village in the Dominican Republic near the Haitian border, volunteering at a traveling medical clinic. They helped provide medical supplies that were in dire need in the poverty-stricken village. The group soon discovered that the majority of patients who came to the clinic were not Dominicans, but rather Haitians who would walk for hours, crossing the border deep in the mountains, to seek medical care they couldn’t receive in their own country.

Upon her return to Aquinas in the fall as a sophomore, Barker’s thoughts remained on the people she helped in the Dominican Republic and Haiti over the summer. She knew there was so much more she could do to help, and was determined to make that happen. Her first plan was to push for a change in the Service-Learning program. Instead of spending the entire trip in the Dominican Republic, Barker thought it would be beneficial for the trip to be split into two parts, with students spending one week in the Dominican Republic and one week in Haiti.

“Aquinas has had past trips to Haiti, and even a joint trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic once before, but it had been about three years since the school had gone to Haiti,” Barker explains. “I wanted to make a trip like this happen and I was completely dedicated to making it happen.”

What happened next, Barker says, “Turned out to be what some people must consider fate.”

While walking on campus one day, Barker ran into Eric Bridge, the coordinator of Service-Learning programs. Bridge informed Barker he was going to visit a warehouse the following day that might be able to supply the next Aquinas trip to the Dominican Republic with free medical supplies, and he invited Barker to join him. This warehouse turned out to be the Rays of Hope for Haiti supply warehouse, located in downtown Grand Rapids.

Rays of Hope for Haiti is a ministry organization specializing in bringing various supplies from the United States to humanitarian relief programs working in Haiti. During that first visit to the supply warehouse, Barker discovered entire floors filled with boxes and shelves of medical supplies that had been donated from hospitals that no longer needed them.

“I cannot describe and do justice to my first experience inside the warehouse,” says Barker. “There were rows and rows of shelves, and piled on them were tons of medical supplies. The supplies were thrown everywhere, in no order at all, and there were hundreds of unopened boxes just waiting to be opened and sorted through.”

As a member of the Community Action Volunteers of Aquinas (CAVA), Barker immediately saw the potential for a new volunteering opportunity at the Rays of Hope warehouse. She quickly organized a group of Aquinas students to volunteer at the warehouse once a week, opening boxes of supplies and organizing them in an easy-to-find system.

Things took an unexpected turn in the beginning of the following semester, as Barker was organizing more group volunteering opportunities at Rays of Hope through CAVA. On January 12, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing over 230,000 people and leaving more than one million homeless and in need of emergency aid.

“The earthquake changed the way things operated at the Rays of Hope warehouse and gave the organization some much needed publicity,” says Barker. The organization immediately began asking for more volunteers to help organize and pack relief supplies to be shipped in freight containers to Haiti. Volunteers poured in from all over Michigan, including Barker and an even larger group of Aquinas students.

Barker spent every Saturday of her spring semester volunteering at Rays of Hope. She also organized the Hope for Haiti fundraiser at Aquinas, which raised over $3,600 and collected 20,000 cubic feet of supplies to be donated to Rays of Hope.

>>Read Part Two