Sarah Hipp, Social Worker
CANEY FORK–As a recent Western Carolina University graduate who’d already weathered years of true tribulation, Sarah Hipp might’ve hoped for some peace and quiet. A dose of gentle routine. But hers is a good story, and good stories tend to run along at a pace all their own.
In the weeks since graduation, Hipp has found herself chatting with Angelina Jolie on her phone while weaving through traffic, deciphering Robert DeNiro’s thick accent in another call, and drawing a hilarious blank when Jackie Chan introduced himself in New York City. She’s made the acquaintance of Desmond Tutu, Mia Farrow and Cherie Booth.
In the past six months she’s traveled in North America and Africa with African pop and traditional music star Jean-Paul Samputu, and in Central America with Western North Carolina folk icon David LaMotte. And it’s only begun.
If this seems like heady, name-droppy stuff for a Cullowhee youngster with a new degree in Social Work, Hipp admits, in her smiling and vaguely puzzled way, that it is. She has a quiet manner, and likes keeping company with children. And she has no apparent interest in pop culture, other than the passing contacts that few can avoid.
On the other hand, her story makes perfect sense when you untangle it.
Hipp, a 2001 graduate of Smoky Mountain High School, has lived in Jackson County since she was three.
As a teenager, she was removed from a dysfunctional home life and placed in foster care with Patty and Joseph Long of Caney Fork. In 2002, while a student at Southwestern Community College, she was involved in a horrific head-on collision on the Haywood County side of Balsam Gap, when the car she was driving hit a vehicle that was traveling the wrong way in the eastbound lanes. The wreck could’ve taken her life, but instead it has cost her 11 surgeries on her face, jaw and knees, with more to come.
After the wreck and the beginnings of recovery, she transferred to UNC-Asheville and began work at the Swannanoa 4H Education Center, where she was a counselor. She also worked at the offices of Black Mountain’s Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF). But reverse-serendipity wasn’t done with her yet, and the Black Mountain house she shared with several other counselors burned to the ground, taking all of her belongings.
Back to Sylva she came, to the support of friends and foster family and the furthering of her education at WCU.
She kept working at LEAF, though, and in the summer of 2006 things broke in a different direction. Many of us are familiar with LEAF’s fantastic twice-yearly music festivals at Black Mountain, but fewer perhaps with the strong international program that the organization sponsors.
LaMotte, a performer she had known before, began work with LEAF on an outreach program to Guatemala. Hipp assisted, and has since traveled to that country twice for the organization.
At a LEAF concert in 2006 she met Samputu, and with LEAF she traveled to Rwanda to meet a group of orphans of the Rwandan genocide that Samputu supported through his work.
She and Samputu hit it off.
“He recognized that I was mostly there for the kids, I think,” Hipp says. “We have the same vision to help the children, so we stayed in touch.”
Last fall, Samputu brought a performance troupe of the Rwandan orphans – “Mizero” – to the United States for a lengthy tour. The performers were all children and young teenagers, many of whom had never left their rural village, and all of whom had lost their parents to the genocide. The tour stretched from coast to coast and into Canada, and included performances at the UN Millenium Celebration in New York.
Just before the children arrived, the tour’s manager was lost to some odd circumstance, and Hipp, who had helped organize the visit in a volunteer capacity, stepped in.
What followed has been a whirlwind both magical and intense.
Nearly everything these children saw was a first for them, from jetliners to ice cream to the ocean. Most hadn’t seen television. And when to their amazement they performed before a gym full of Sylva high school students who absolutely, positively would not be compelled to dance, they knew no better than to take offense. Hipp had to convince both dancers and chaperones that none was intended.
Nationally, the children’s musicianship – in combination with their compelling story – brought interest and crowds wherever they performed, and eventually a level of financial support for Mizero that will allow the organization to set up shop in the United States to continue outreach work for the orphans of Rwanda. Once things are up and running, Hipp has a standing offer to manage the group’s international programs.
How did her tumultuous early life prepare her for this?
“I’ve always had a desire to work with kids, but I can certainly sympathize and empathize with these children more because of my background,” Hipp says. “As far as the Rwandan kids go, I understand what it feels like to be displaced, or to not know how things are going to work out. A lot of these kids are going through that – they don’t know how they’re going to make it from day to day.”
And what about all the star power? Mizero quickly built a strong relationship with the United Nations, and is working closely with the UN to film a documentary in support of the UN’s Millenium Project, which is built around the accomplishment of eight development goals toward the elimination of extreme poverty. The UN hopes to recruit eight film stars – one for each goal – to help make the film. The responsibility fell to Hipp to give candidates an overview of the program.
And Chan? Her meeting with the star of the “Rush Hour” films and other action-comedies was by chance, at a performance in New York. She was helping dress the kids when he walked up to introduce himself. They said their hellos, but when it was obvious that Hipp was drawing a blank, he said “I was in “Rush Hour.””
“Oh me, too,” she answered. “Traffic here is awful. Nothing like it is at home.”
