Press conference transcript & video

The conscientious decision to say phrases like “it changed
my life” are made as easily these days as the effort it takes to voice the
sound and form the words. The notion has become more a cliche than a true
life-altering experience, a throwaway phrase, if you will.

Watching Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart, football head
coach Joker Phillips and two of his players, seniors Danny Trevathan and Stuart
Hines, talk about last month’s service trip to Ethiopia, one doesn’t get the
feeling that their travels to Africa was just any other experience.

Seeing the four talk at a podium about the love,
gratefulness and warmth the people of Ethiopia showed them in a
poverty-stricken, disease-riddled country that features dilapidated living
environments, homeless children, bad drinking water, scarce food, rolling
blakcouts and a life expectancy of less than 50, there’s a genuine feeling of a
new appreciation for life in America and the privileges of being at the
University of Kentucky.

As Barnhart said Friday in the opening minutes of the media
availability, what they saw over in Ethiopia was “not good,” but it no doubt
served as an eye opener and a life changer.

“It was overall an unbelievable experience,” Phillips said.
“If you have any heart or anything in your soul, you can’t go over there and it
not change your life.”

Barnhart, Phillips, Trevathan and Hines went to Ethiopia
last month on a UK-sponsored trip to lend a hand to people in dire need of
help. The group did plenty of charity work while they were there, but the four
received just as much in return.

“We went over there to serve all those people and we really
got a lot more out of it than they did, I’m sure,” said Hines, an offensive
lineman.  

That tends to happen when you see children without shoes,
running water and barely any muscle to cover their bones digging through a
landfill to find food and tradable goods. That’s what happens when you see
people that have next to nothing look past bitterness and open their arms to
more fortunate people. That’s what happens when you see starving children smile
and laugh over the simple kick of a soccer ball or the throw of a football.

The four, particularly Hines and Trevathan, came back from Africa
with a different view of the world.

“We are here playing football and on scholarship, have our
school paid for and have a roof over our head and food provided for us,” Hines
said. “It is not like that at all in some places. There are 500,000 kids that
live on the street in Ethiopia. That could have easily been one of us that
ended up in a life like that, but we are blessed enough to have the
opportunities that we have had.”

Jason Schlafer, associate athletics director for marketing
and licensing , who has an adopted child from Ethiopia, concocted the trip during the
2010 Gam3Day Ready Tour.

The idea behind the original Gam3Day Ready Tour, a five-city
trip last summer through the state of Kentucky, was to show kids across the
state the importance of getting out in their communities and staying active.
During each stop, Phillips and the UK marketing team hosted a free mini-combine
at local parks for boys and girls eighth grade and under to teach them more
about the game of football.

On the way back from one of the stops, as Phillips and the
staff rested, they decided to watch “Invictus,” a film that chronicles Nelson
Mandela’s unification of his apartheid-torn country of South Africa through the
enlistment of a national rugby team. In the movie, the Gam3Day Ready staff
watched closely as the 1995 South African rugby team went into the communities
of South Africa to promote a foreign game and inspire unification.

As Schlafer observed the film, he realized they were doing
something of similar motivation and wanted to take the tour to
the next step. Eventually, it evolved into May’s trip to Ethiopia, a summer mission that
Barnhart hopes to expand into an annual program that could feature up to eight
student-athletes from UK’s various sports.

One thing it is not, Barnhart said, is a recruiting ploy.

“Our goal, as a department, is to educate,” Barnhart said. “We
get to play a lot of games and do a lot of things that you guys count in Ws and
Ls, but at the end of the day, our job is to educate young people and to expand
their horizons and their minds and their hearts. This is part of that process.”

It was a trip Trevathan and Hines will never forget, both
good and bad.

They delivered food to 48 families in Korah, a village near
a landfill where residents sift through garbage to find food and the life
expectancy is 37. They dug ditches, planted trees and flowers, painted an
outhouse and visited an orphanage.

The group laughed at the podium as they reflected on the
NASCAR-like driving of one of their tour guides and talked about a mix-up with
the military, a misunderstanding that resulted in three AK-47s being pointed at
them.

While learning about Ethiopia, its people and their struggles,
Hines and Trevathan gained lessons they said they could apply to their upcoming
football season. Hines said he learned about leadership through local village
leaders, and Trevathan gained a better understanding of unification and coming
together after watching the people of Ethiopia work together through near-unbearable
conditions.

Maybe their most rewarding work was just playing soccer with
the kids or teaching them football. Many of the kids were diseased and hadn’t
bathed, but Hines tickled them and Trevathan hugged them anyways.

They hardly flinched, Phillips said, in relating with kids
they could barely understand or hardly relate to. Phillips said he learned that
Hines has a great sense of humor and a great personality. Trevathan, he found
out, “is a hugger.” And of Barnhart and his wife, Connie, Phillips learned they
don’t mind getting their hands dirty to help out others.

All four shared a bond that’s carried over from the trip.

“What I was most proud of was the guys here on the end
(Hines and Trevathan) and the way they conducted themselves and the way their
hearts reached out to a country of people and the things that they did to help,”
Barnhart said.

“Stuart had an unbelievable ability because of his size that
kids were attracted to him. He would play ball with them and we took a bunch of
Nike balls and football and they played not knowing the language. It was fun to
watch them play. Danny has a way with little babies and children like you can’t
understand. He has a great heart for that. He was in a nursery doing stuff and
holding them in his arms and rocking them and playing with them and sitting on
the floor with them. You never knew he could be that kind.”

Two moments that may forever live with Trevathan and Hines
happened in Korah, particularly when Trevathan watched a 35-year-old lady die right
before his eyes.

The UK linebacker was delivering food in a tent no bigger
than a trailer when a woman, shaking, caught his eye.

“I felt like something was wrong right then and there,”
Trevathan said. “At first I was taken back and then I looked up and she looked
right at me and looked like she wanted my hand. I have her my hand and she said
thank you. After that, I turned around and shook my head and was walking back
and someone told me that they thought that was her last breath.

“She found time to say thank you for me with her last breath
and that is what touched me the most. We live good every day and sometimes we
can’t find the time to say thank you, but she did.”

The other moment, a telling sign of what the four got out of
Ethiopia, came when the UK party met a woman suffering from AIDS who had
recently given birth to an HIV-negative child. The woman had to make a choice
between feeding her starving child with her breast milk and possibly passing on
the disease or not feeding the child at all.

Phillips and Barnhart refused to leave until they could
gather enough money to pay for some formula.

“That, in a nutshell, shows you what kind of people they are
and what it was like to be around them,” Hines said. “They are extremely caring
and generous.”