With a Song in Their Hearts : Charity: Lutherans will donate $35,000 in supplies to Czech hospital during European concert tour.

Choir members from the Mount of Olives Lutheran Church hope to take their music and $35,000 worth of medical equipment to about 400 patients in a remote Czech Republic hospital during a summer concert tour of Europe.

The 35-member choir will be touring five cities next month and has been working to turn their “tour into a mission,” said project coordinator Elizabeth Evans, after working from sunup to sundown packing the equipment into a 2,500-cubic-feet cargo shipment.

“It’s been miracle-by-miracle the entire way,” Evans said.

Over the past year, members have solicited friends and area businesses to donate old and unused hospital equipment to a hospital about 1,000 years old in the city of Velehrad, Vienna and Prague.

“We wanted to do something in the Czech Republic because that’s the neediest country that we’ll visit during our tour,” Evans said. “The others are Switzerland, Germany and Austria, which are pretty well off.”

The chosen hospital was recommended by a spokesman at the Czech Republic embassy and verified through friends who visited the newly formed country last October, Evans said.

After deciding on a focus for their project, choir members and friends wrote letters to area hospitals and also sought donations of beds, wheelchairs and other medical supplies from local companies. They have accumulated 31 beds, 18 wheelchairs, linens and a host of other equipment, Evans said.

“At first, we thought it would be ambitious to collect enough for a 20-foot truck,” she said. “Now we’re trying to fit everything in a 40-foot truck.”

To ship the equipment, the choir raised $10,000 through fund-raisers such as benefit concerts and singing telegrams, Evans said. At first, church members wanted to send money, but that would not have been much help because “the needed equipment is not available for purchase there,” Evans said.

Among those who will join Evans on the trip is Victoria Ingram-Curlee, who gained national attention in 1994 when she decided to donate a kidney to her husband, Randall Curlee. Ingram-Curlee, a choir member, said she is excited about her first trip to Europe, but the thing that she is looking forward to the most is “the look on the people’s faces when they see us and what we’ve got for them.”

“Apparently this hospital has an annual budget of $10,000 to cover everything,” she said. “This will be a tremendous help to them.”

Todayabout 200 members of the congregation will gather to take a photo beside the cargo before it is shipped later this month, in time for the load to be there when the choir arrives in late June.

“My dream is that our bus is going down the road and our (cargo) truck is following us,” Evans said.