WM Student To Appear On Oprah This Week

By Amber Lester Kennedy Monday, November 15, 2010

William and Mary sophomore Danny Yates will appear on The Oprah Show this week.

Danny Yates will be in Chicago on Tuesday for the taping. The episode will air Friday at 4 p.m. on channel 13 in the Hampton Roads area.

The Oprah Show invited Yates to participate in a show about the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12. Yates was in Haiti during the earthquake, which killed approximately 300,000 people.

Since the earthquake, Yates founded the Hinche Scholars Project, which works on behalf of displaced Haitian university students. The Hinche Scholars Project is a partnership between Barber-Scotia College, the I Have a Dream Foundation of Richmond and the town of Hinche, located northeast of Port-au-Prince. Its mission is to help Haiti rebuild through higher education, by helping displaced students continue their studies in the U.S.

Yates, a Richmond native, has travelled to Haiti several times as a guide and translator for Catholic churches in the Diocese of Richmond. He was in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck, and upon seeing the damage, vowed to help in any way he could. In January, he told William and Mary News that he promised a friend he would bring relief to the people he left behind, and that he intended to make good on his promise.

On the website for the Hinche Scholars Project, Yates expresses his belief that higher education is the only sustainable and successful path for recovery. The earthquake left a leadership void after thousands of politicians, doctors, nurses, aid workers and more were killed and nearly all the country’s universities were destroyed.

Soon after leaving Haiti, he spoke with community leaders who told him about six Haitian students whose universities were destroyed. He worked for months to find an American higher education institution that would accept these students, according to the project’s site. Finally, Barber-Scotia College in Concord, N.C. accepted the students, offering substantial scholarships to study for two years. Barber-Scotia is a small, historically black, Christian college; its original mission is to educate the less fortunate. The college is in the process of developing an English as a Second Language program that will include courses in accounting, economics, environmental science, government and history.

The Hinche Scholars Project hopes to have the students studying at Barber-Scotia by the spring semester. In the meantime, Yates and fellow volunteers are working to obtain visas, health insurance and funding for the students to study in the U.S. To donate toward the students’ living expenses, click here.