So I decided to try a new volunteer experience this semester instead of returning to St. Agnes.  I do have a lot of good stories from my work there as a volunteer in the surgical clinic, but it really wasn’t the experience I was looking for; I didn’t have any patient interaction and I didn’t feel like I was really helping anyone that much.  So instead, this semester I got a volunteer position with Project HEALTH, a nonprofit organization that works to provide preventative care to families who do not have all of their needs met, such as food and shelter.  We will be stationed at St. Agnes (go figure, same place, different job) and having physician refer patients to us so we can provide them with resources like food stamps or emergency shelters.  It sounds really cool and it sounds like I might really be able to make a difference in some of these people’s lives.

Tonight we had our first training session, and tomorrow I have another, and Sunday I have yet another!  It isn’t too bad though, we had some ice breakers and some introduction to the program, and then a pretty fun simulation where we were split into “families” and each o us had certain needs to maintain.  I was JJ, a 9th grader in a single-mom family with another son, Mark, who had frequent asthma attacks.  The simulation showed basically how people get pushed around a lot, saying you need a slip from here before you can go there and that by the time you get one step forward, an emergency happens like an asthma attack, and you end up back where you started.  While fun and frustrated, it definetely put things in perspective.