Catching up with Jennifer Schechter
Few people, if any, could have imagined the exciting life that Jennifer Schechter would experience in the years following her graduation from Huntington High School in June 2000. Her name is known in households thousands of miles away from her childhood home and she has become a true humanitarian in the fullest sense of the word.
A graduate of Georgetown University, Ms. Schechter recently moved to Seattle to pursue a dual master’s degree in social work and public health at the University of Washington. While in grad school, she is continuing to serve as executive director of Hope Through Health, an international organization that offers technical and financial assistance to community-directed health initiatives in Togo, West Africa.
Ms. Schechter has been joined in Seattle by her fiancé, Kevin Fiori, Jr, the founder of HTH, who is in his first year of medical school at the University of Washington. “We both plan to use our degrees to continue the work we’ve begun with Hope Through Health,” she said. “We hope to return to Togo for a visit next summer.”
Ms. Schechter was born, raised and educated in Huntington and her parents continue to reside in the same family home today. “So I’m a Huntington girl through and through,” she said. “During my four years at Huntington High School I was involved in a number of activities both at school and in the community.”
Those activities included work with the student government, the HOPE (Huntington Outreach Peer Educators) club and four years on both the Blue Devil soccer and lacrosse teams. Ms. Schechter also served with the Huntington Youth Bureau as a peer educator and sat on that organization’s advisory board.
“While at Huntington High School, I received tremendous encouragement from all my teachers, most notably, student government advisor Leslie Mitek and HOPE advisor Judith Jakhelln,” Ms. Schechter said. “I always felt fortunate to live in Huntington where there was a wealth of opportunities to get involved in important community service activities.”
In June of her senior year, Ms. Schechter was presented with the prestigious T. Christopher Pettit Memorial Scholarship, which helped make attending Georgetown University financially easier for her family. “During my four years at Georgetown, I stayed involved in community service, but also developed a strong interest in international affairs and Africa, in particular,” she said.
As a Georgetown senior, Ms. Schechter decided to join the Peace Corps. Two months after earning her undergraduate degree, she headed off to Togo, a small West African country where she would eventually serve for 27 months as a community health volunteer.
“I had wanted to join the Peace Corps for as long as I can remember,” she said. “I think my interest first piqued when my fifth grade teacher at Huntington Elementary, Joanne Kavanagh would recount stories from her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria. Before leaving for the Peace Corps I received tremendous support from the Huntington community. I was fortunate to set up a partnership with my former forth grade teacher at Huntington Elementary, Jim Lauter. Mr. Lauter allowed me to come in and speak to his current fourth grade class at the time about Africa. He and his class then kept up an extended correspondence, sending me letters and pictures throughout my service in Togo. A pack of letters from Mr. Lauter’s fourth grade class always brightened my day and allowed me to teach the children in Togo about what their peers in America were learning.”
The Huntington grad’s parents, Evie and Duncan Schechter and her brother James, were also “incredibly supportive” of her decision to join the Peace Corps. “My parents visited me in Togo during my first year of service, where they were greeted by my entire village at a festival, complete with music and dancing, held in their honor at the Chief’s house,” Ms. Schechter recalled. “My mother has returned to Togo twice since that first visit and is fondly referred to as “Mama” by every adult and child in my village.”
When she first arrived in Togo in September 2004, Ms. Schechter underwent three months of language and technical training to prepare her for work as a health volunteer. In December of that year she began her service, living alone in the small village of Koumonde, a rural town in the north of Togo with electricity but without running water. The majority of Koumonde’s 5,000 residents are Muslim and their main source of income is subsistence farming.
“My original assignment in Koumonde was health education, but it quickly became apparent that the village needed much more than education,” Ms. Schechter said. “Koumonde had an obvious health crisis on its hands and I soon began directing residents to an HIV/AIDS clinic located in the city of Kara, 30 miles north of Koumonde. The clinic in Kara was run by Association Espoir pour Demain (AED-Lidaw or Hope for Tomorrow), a group of individuals living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. AED-Lidaw was supported by a U.S.-based not-for-profit organization, Hope Through Health (HTH), founded by another Peace Corps volunteer living in Kara, Kevin Fiori, Jr.”
In the fall of 2004, HTH’s clinic was the only source of treatment available to people living with HIV/AIDS outside of Togo’s capital, Lome. “We were incredibly fortunate that the clinic was there,” Ms. Schechter said. “Within a few months, over 30 individuals from Koumonde were traveling to and from the clinic on a regular basis and a number of others remained hospitalized in Kara. We soon realized that the long commute was taking a toll on patients in ill health who could barely afford the bus fare, let alone medical treatment. As a result, we decided to open the first satellite clinic in Bafilo, a town next door to Koumonde.”
In her final year with the Peace Corps, Ms. Schechter worked daily to assist the local branch of AED-Lidaw that had formed in Bafilo to open and run a rural clinic. “By the time I left Togo in December 2006, we had over 100 children and adults receiving regular treatment services at this rural clinic. It was a difficult and incredible experience that I can scarcely describe in a few lines, but it inspired me to stay involved with HTH forever.”
When she returned to the United States, Ms. Schechter joined the HTH board of directors. In January 2008, she was nominated to serve as the group’s executive director.
“HTH is a very appealing organization to donors because we have minimal overhead costs,” she explained. “We guarantee that 99 percent of every dollar donated is spent directly on programs in Togo. One way that we do this is by maintaining an entirely volunteer staff in the U.S. All of our fundraising and advocacy activities are carried out by a network of volunteers located throughout the U.S. Many of these volunteers are former Peace Corps volunteers and others are just concerned citizens. We could not sustain our essential programs in Togo without the dedication and hard work of all of our volunteers and committed donors.”
Since HTH is a small organization with an annual budget of about $300,000, it isn’t eligible for many large grants. “The profile of our average donor is a twenty or thirty-something who gives $20 a month as part of our Stand With Us Campaign,” Ms. Schechter said. “This campaign encourages donors to support one individual living with AIDS in Togo for one year at an annual cost of $240, which is automatically deducted in monthly increments of $20 from their credit card. $20 a month seems cheap to us, but it can literally keep someone alive for another year in Togo!”
Planning is now well underway for HTH’s third annual Huntington fundraiser on Sat. Nov. 15 at the Huntington Yacht Club from 7-9 p.m. Tickets to the event, which features a silent auction, are priced at $75 per person and include food and open refreshments. For more information on the event or to reserve tickets, contact Evie Schechter at (631) 427-1486 or (516) 885-3203 or by e-mail at dschecht@optonline.net. If the event doesn’t sell-out in advance, tickets will be available at the door.
HTH has a large and loyal donor base in Huntington and Ms. Schechter said the organization is “very grateful for their incredible support. The first benefit was held in January 2007 less than a month after I returned from my Peace Corps service in Togo. The event was an amazing success, raising over $13,000. This success and the requests of many attendees inspired us to hold the event again this past January.
The 2nd annual benefit raised over $16,000 for HTH!. These funds allowed us to expand our program to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to children.”
Ms. Schechter returned to Togo last spring. “During my visit I spent a lot of time with these expecting and new mothers,” she said. “I cannot express to you the joy that they feel when they learn that their babies are born HIV free. Since its inception, 18 babies have gone through this program and 17 of those 18 have tested HIV negative. This program ensures that babies are born with a fair chance in life. I can’t think of a more effective use of funds. It is thanks in large part to the Huntington community that we are able to support this essential program.”
Although Ms. Schechter is on America’s west coast, her mind keeps drifting back to the Nov. 15th HTH fundraiser in Huntington. “There is much more work to be done in Togo and we need everyone’s help to continue this fight,” she said. “I would like to thank all the residents of Huntington and especially those individuals and local businesses who have contributed so generously to this event and the success of HTH in the past. On behalf of our friends in Togo, ‘n’labale.’ Thank you for standing in solidarity with those living with HIV/AIDS!”
Ms. Schechter can be contacted through the Hope Through Health website (www.hthglobal.org) at jschechter@hthglobal.org.
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