I’m asking some of the people you might encounter on the UMBC campus, including students, faculty, staff and alumni, to answer a few questions about themselves and their experiences. These are their responses.
Hometown: Waldorf, MD
Q: How long have you been at UMBC?
A: 3.5 years
Q: In 12 words or less, what role(s) do you play on campus?
A: I am a student involved with service, justice & leadership organizations/groups.
Q: What aspect of your UMBC role(s) do you enjoy most?
A: Involvement in leadership roles on campus has granted me intimate access to two opportunities that no purely academic class ever has:
- A chance to develop and process a constantly evolving understanding of myself and the people around me; and
- Innumerable opportunities to use that understanding along with the knowledge I gain in academic classes to make positive changes in the world around me.
Other than that, I really enjoy traveling for internships and service events. Having a free meal plan doesn’t hurt either. Believe me, I put it to good use.
Q: What is the most important or memorable thing you learned in college/have learned at UMBC?
A: Most important lessons: How to ask questions, how to express my feelings with words, and how to conjugate irregular verbs like “to wake” in English. I am actually still working on all of these lessons.
Most memorable lessons: When I was a sophomore I took a class called “Foundations of Leadership,” where we played a game called “Win as Much as You Can.” The lessons that I learned from that game hit me like a speeding bus when class ended. My brain had that feeling my mouth has after I eat a mint. Just in case someone may read this and then get the opportunity to play it, I will not divulge the lesson in full. However, I will say that if you understand it the way I understood it, you’ll never look at student organizations, bureaucracies, school cliques, international politics or any other group scenarios the same way again. It also changed the way I interact with friends that belong to organizations to which I do not.
Q: Complete this sentence: "I am a big fan of __________"
A: Controversial books, movies, ideas and personalities. Besides providing content to fill awkward silences with people I don’t know, I believe that you can tell a lot about a couple, a group of friends, neighbors and even a country by the way it resolves conflicts of ideas. I am also a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Il Divo’s music and Oprah’s existence.
Q: Do you have any UMBC stories, little-known facts about UMBC, favorite spots on campus, or anything else you’d like to share?
A: My favorite spot on campus is very conventional, I’m afraid. It’s my room. I love having that place to retreat. I also have a great view. I can see how long the line is at the dining hall from my window, so I know whether I can walk the 100 ft from Potomac with just a sweatshirt or if I should put on a coat and trek to Chick-fil-a. J
Story: Last summer, I impulsively signed up for a 1-week Alternative School Break service trip to Patch Adams’ Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia as a replacement for someone who had dropped out of the group. Because I was a last minute addition, I didn’t get to attend any of the group prep-sessions or bonding activities, and had only been given a packing list, a departure/arrival schedule and notice that I would be doing gardening, cooking, cleaning and volunteer work.
I assumed that I’d be taking a bus with a big group of students to a gleaming new age medical facility in semi-rural West Virginia. I’d paint murals on recovery room walls and garden tomatoes or lettuce to supplement the cafeteria’s offerings. There was movie about these people, so I knew it was a pretty upscale and high-profile place, and I knew my family would approve of helping out in such an institution. Well, due to some miscommunication with a list-proc, I was not notified about a change to the departure date from UMBC, so I missed the bus. I told my mother what had happened, so we got directions and set out to drive the 7+ hours to Hillsboro, WV. Toward the end of the directions we began getting confused. For at least 30 minutes we’d been on meandering mountain roads with hairpin turns and narrow lanes that were difficult to pass, even with a Honda Civic. I thought, how on Earth does an ambulance make it to this hospital, especially during the harsh, icy Shenandoah winters? Then, at the last turn on the directions we entered a gravel road in the middle of a field.
Okay. There’s a problem with this scenario.
We assumed we were lost, but we were deep (DEEP) in rural West Virginia at night with no cell-phone service and hadn’t seen any other ethnic minorities for the past 3 hours, so we were uncomfortable asking for directions. Well, we asked anyway. We drove onto a horse farm and I asked the owner if she knew where Gesundheit was. She told me that the directions I had were accurate and that I was only about two miles from my destination. So we went back and followed the directions through the field past an abandoned fire truck, a three-story shack and a chicken coop to a huge wooden house whimsically shaped like a combination between a fleur-de-lis and bishop piece of a chess set (You find out why when you visit).
Hmmm, not what we expected, but UMBC student Jerome Graham was in the driveway waiting for us, so we were relieved to be at the right address. “Oh, okay! The volunteer housing and the medical center are in different locations. That makes sense: they needed lots of room for the farming, which could not be accommodated on the medical site,” I thought. He walked us over a bridge, past “the chrysalis” and into the house, where we were greeted by a barefooted woman dressed head-to-toe in tie-dye. We were escorted down to the basement where the orientation video was being played. The orientation video showed Patch Adams discussing his endeavors and achievements and then mentioned the hospital. He stated that the hospital was a part of a larger plan to change health care in the future, and something to the effect of “the hospital isn’t in brick and mortar yet, but it is real. It is in our minds.”
What?! I drove all the way out here to volunteer at a hospital that doesn’t exist?
Then the video showed people with PhDs and MDs wearing tie-dye with untamed hair talking about how “no one leaves Gesundheit the way they came,” and how Gesundheit changes minds and changes hearts with its unique “philosophies,” “mental challenges” and “opportunities.” I kept looking around and everyone in the room had a straight face as though they were expecting to hear all of this—except for my mother. Her discomfort was apparent. At that point my mother had heard all of the buzzwords she needed to confirm that she had just delivered her son to an acid-tripping hippie cult in West Virginia. And then it got better. The video showed Patch Adams and four other people pulling down their pants and launching bottle rockets from their anuses. Mom was no longer uncomfortable; she was shocked and appalled.
After the video, we all went to bed. Against her intuition, my mother left in the morning, trusting that I knew what I was getting myself into and that if something ever went wrong, I would know what to do. And from that point on, I had one of the best weeks of my life.
We all did maintenance on the Gesundheit grounds, performed hard labor setting up an enrichment/empowerment camp for academically talented girls, performed as clowns in a parade through a small town, and maintained an organic vegan diet (except for the day we ate fish that group mates had caught themselves and burgers made with buffalo meat). We met a man who refines his own bio-diesel, attended a concert by a classically trained piano/fiddle duo at the home of famous author Pearl Buck, and traveled to the palatial lodge of a former NIH scientist who abandoned his life in Maryland to travel around North America and create a nature education site that can only be reached by crossing a river in a high-mounted pick-up truck or a boat. Along the way we learned about the disparities between the urban/suburban and rural areas, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the repressed and the genders. Teamwork, collectivism, sacrifice, creativity, ethics and justice were all stressed and I discovered that everything we learned there applies to health care!
The video was right. I left West Virginia with perspectives that radically changed the way I see society and my place in it. I didn’t join a cult, but I did join a group of friends and mentors that challenged me to touch live worms (yuck!) so that I could go fishing, to learn to drive a stick-shift truck so that I could transport lumber from the chopping site to the firewood stacks, and to hug a live, territorial turkey because it could be done.
No standard volunteer shift at a high-end hospital in up-scale suburbs could have provided those opportunities, and because of that experience last summer, I joined the ASB planning team in the Fall so that I could do my part to ensure that more students get to experience the fulfillment that service has given me for the past 3 years.
