Volunteering with AmeriCorps changes your life. What you experience, accomplish, and endure during your year of service cannot be taken away. Isn’t that awesome?
The AmeriCorps program I participated in was the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC). I was at the Southeast Campus when it was still located in Charleston, South Carolina. For those who are not familiar, NCCC sets you up in a “team” of roughly eleven people to travel around the region in a fifteen-passenger van, doing four to six projects over the course of a ten-month term of service. Projects focus on public safety, the environment, disaster relief, education, and unmet basic human needs. My second project took place at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Every member of my team was assigned to different wards of the hospital based on need and interest. I volunteered to work in the ICU, specifically the Cardiovascular ICU. There were many people who touched me when I worked in the ward, but when I think back, there are two young men specifically who stand out. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call then Jay and Yu. Jay was twenty-three years old, the oldest patient in the Cardiovascular ICU. He had been a patient of the hospital since he was a small child, and the hospital continued to treat him as he got older. Yu was thirteen years old and from Japan. He had been flown to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital for the high level of care that was internationally renowned.
Jay and Yu both had congestive heart failure and were in desperate need of transplants, but in the Cardiovascular ICU they were the “big kids.” The majority of the kids in the ward were under four years old, and although Jay and Yu were scared too, they tried to make the younger kids more comfortable. Many days, I would come to the Cardiovascular ICU and find Jay or Yu playing with the other kids either in their own rooms or in the kids’ playroom. In my second week at the hospital, Jay and Yu had a great idea: “Can we paint the playroom so that it looks like the outside?”
The playroom in the Cardiovascular ICU was separated from the rest of the hospital, because the immune systems of these patients were especially fragile. Unfortunately, the ward was in the interior of the hospital, so there were no windows for the kids to look out of in their playroom. Jay, Yu, and I asked for permission to paint the playroom, and it was granted. Over the next week we painted the walls all the way around the playroom. We painted an ocean with fish, a field, trees, sneaky cats, and birds playing instruments in the trees. It was fun—a group project—and many of the patients, with their families, got involved. Even if they didn’t feel up to participating, patients would want to come in and watch us paint. They might not have known what they were doing at the time, but Jay and Yu had found a way to bring the Cardiovascular ICU community together.
The project opened the doors to new friendships for a lot of the kids and their families. Typically, the patients had stayed closed up in their rooms because they didn’t feel well enough to go to the playroom, and their parents didn’t get the chance to mingle. In all the excitement around painting the playroom, more patients (and their parents) got the opportunity to meet each other. Once the playroom was finished, I found more kids and their parents not only playing together in the playroom but also hanging out more in each other’s rooms.
Jay and Yu found a way to make a scary situation more comfortable. Their great idea brought with it a positive energy, making the unit a happy and carefree environment. I was not able to keep tabs on my patients after my project ended, but I know that whatever directions their lives took, Jay and Yu had a profound impact on the lives of those children.
No comments:
Post a Comment