Country music singer and humanitarian Kenneth “Big Kenny” Alphin made a pit stop at ETSU on Thursday to meet the first two ASPIRE Appalachia scholarship winners and speak about his work in Haiti and Sudan.Part of the “Leading Voices in Public Health” lecture series, Alphin’s talk centered around his personal motto – “love everybody.” The slogan also serves as the name of his organization, which in partnership with The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, sponsors Alphin’s humanitarian ventures.

“My mission statement is to highlight the good, to inspire greatness and to encourage mutual responsibility for the betterment of human kind,” Alphin said in an interview before the lecture.

Alphin’s trips to Sudan in 2007 and 2009 with nuns from My Sister’s Keeper in Boston, resulted in the construction of the “Kunyuk School for Girls,” where more than 550 female students are currently enrolled. Before the build, class was held underneath a tree with a chalkboard nailed to it, Alphin said.

While telling the story, Alphin gripped a beaded necklace that hung around his neck, which was a gift from the Sudanese students on his last visit.

Building a school in the middle of a war-torn country wasn’t a smooth process. A week before his 2007 trip, Alphin and his crew found themselves wondering how they were going to hook to a power source once they go into Sudan. The person who had promised to help didn’t show up, so Alphin called Walter Ratterman, a fellow humanitarian Alphin had seen in the PBS documentary “Beyond the Call” who was working to put light bulbs in Haitian rural health clinics through the SunEPI organization.

“In that movie it showed that he knew how to power up anything anywhere and he knew how to communicate using a satellite phone,” Alphin said.

“He was very nice man, he talked to me for about half an hour and asked me everything that I was doing and told me everything I needed and I think he could tell in the conversation that I was a little overwhelmed with the putting all of these plans together.”

Ratterman offered to travel to Sudan with Alphin, which turned out to be the beginning of a close friendship between the two.

“The big thing is this guy showed up and he didn’t know me from Adam,” Alphin said. “He had been traveling the world so he didn’t know who ‘Big Kenny’ was or ‘Big and Rich’ or any of that kind of stuff.”

Both men have kept in touch ever since the trip. Ratterman sent Alphin a friendly e-mail from Haiti on Jan. 10, two days before the 7.0 magnitude earthquake. When Alphin discovered that Ratterman was missing after the quake, he went to Haiti to look for him. After Ratterman’s body was discovered, Alphin dedicated a song and video in his memory titled “Cry With You,” which can be viewed at www.bigkenny.tv/crywithyou.

Alphin says the reasoning behind his humanitarian work can best be explained by a clip from a Spiderman movie when his uncle is shot.

“Spiderman is leaning over him in the street and his uncle gave him some final words: ‘Just know to those given much, there will be great responsibility,'” Alphin said. The ‘much’ in my life was the successes of having a couple of descent songs and with that success has come great awareness and great need to travel great distances.”

Another issue Alphin is passionate about doesn’t require a lot of travel because it occurs near his family farm in Culpeper, Va. He saw evidence of mountaintop removal, the extraction of coal by exploding the tops of mountains, during a flight back home. It wasn’t long before Alphin was working with former senator Dr. Bill Frist’s “Hope Through Healing Hands” to fund the ASPIRE Appalachia scholarship at ETSU.

The first two recipients, Jodi Southerland of Rogersville and Jenny Hunt of Newport will use the scholarship funds to work in Appalachia. Southerland, a doctoral student in community health, has an interest in elder care in Appalachia. Hunt, a master’s student in health administration, has a desire to work with substance and alcohol abuse treatment.

“Big Kenny” was all smiles during his meeting with the ASPIRE winners before his lecture.

“For me it’s a small price to pay to have this much help,” he said. “I guess I’m one of those people that I worked so hard in my life to get something and then once I got it I realized I don’t want it unless I can do something with it.”

“I think we’ve got ourselves some great Samaritans here.”

“Abigail James, a Public Health graduate student left the lecture feeling very inspired by Alphin’s words.

“It was just awesome,” she said. “It’s easy to ignore what we can’t see. Sometimes people just need to be woken up.

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