Helping the Families Right Down the Street

Believe it or not, Mass Ave. does not vanish past Central Square. Last Friday, I joined a group of Harvard students, all of us sporting pea-coats and toting L.L. Bean backpacks, at the Square's T stop and took the bus to the Boston Medical Center (BMC). We landed in neighborhood only miles from Harvard but worlds apart.

Welcome to the other end of Mass Ave. Here, at the crossroads of the South End, Roxbury and Dorchester, an entirely different set of sights and sounds as well as social ills await, a bit more pressing than those found in the pit.

My hosts, the volunteers with Project HEALTH (Help, Empower, Advocate and Lead through Health), stood out from the crowd in terms of age and skin color, yet they confidently entered the medical center's pediatric wing. The waiting room overflowed with a cacophonous sound--infants, children and their parents crying, laughing and speaking in both Spanish and English.

Project HEALTH's spring semester recruits toured the labyrinthine BMC.

The Project's founder and current director Rebecca Onie '96 led them past overworked nurses, doctors, public health advocates and social workers. The tour provides necessary training for these recruits, before they are faced with the daunting task of staffing the Family Help Desk--one of nine Project HEALTH programs run out of BMC.

Project HEALTH was founded only three years ago, but its programs currently involve over 150 Harvard students who directly serve BMC pediatric patients. All of the programs uniquely combine direct health care service and local public policy advocacy and activism.

Many of the patients need far more than an occasional vaccination or well-baby visit. In addition to critically ill children, BMC's patients desperately seek daily nutrition and hygiene education, information on vocational training, education, child-care, fuel assistance and food pantries.

The atmosphere at the Project HEALTH help desk is a far cry from the HASCS help desk located in the Science Center basement. A folding table adjacent to the pediatric waiting room, the help desk is decorated with brightly-colored, child-friendly posters and offers a variety of services. Volunteers, who attend the desk for two-hour weekly shifts, could be asked about local vocational training programs. "How do I become a nurse's assistant or a data entry specialist?" for example. Parents--many of whom are our age--might saunter over to the help desk to inquire about public camps and programs such as Head Start, the Department of Transitional Assistance and Child Care Choices of Boston.

Amazingly, the average Harvard student--with a little training--can refer welfare mothers to various local health care insurance carriers, expounding on the relative benefits of Mass Health, MBC Healthnet, Boston Health Net and TAFCD (Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or what was once commonly known as welfare). I, on the other hand, can hardly identify my own health insurance carrier.

Mothers stop by to inquire about Women, Infant and Children (WIC) public food assistance so they can feed their children and keep them healthy. A frequent question could be "What are my local housing options if I am a single mother, recently evicted?" The answer to this question, which whole Kennedy School of Government classes try to solve, is immediately doled out by the undergraduate behind the desk.

Let's confess. We students are immersed in a privileged bubble within a privileged sub-culture. As such, rather than service programs such as--GBLS (Greater Boston Legal Services), ABCD (Action for Boston Community Development), EA (Emergency Assistance) and LHA (Local Housing Authority)--we deal with an entirely different highly esoteric set of acronyms. Exasperated, we fantasize about a help desk that could guide us along our path, from FDO to IOP to GMAT to BCG.

Answering questions and referring patients to public assistance programs empowers and eventually transforms the help desk volunteers, according to campus co-coordinator Tiger E. Edwards '00. Although many of the students cannot legally drink or rent a car and some have yet to vote in a presidential election, they are specialists in the eyes of the patients as well as the BMC staff.

No need to study the Lorenz curve. The eye-opening experience of working with the BMC patient community provides a dramatic apotheosis of economic inequality in America. The help desk volunteers counsel families on the basics--how to secure housing, food, employment, vocational training and cash assistance--before ever having rented their own apartment, paying substantial income tax, breast-feeding a baby or signing a lease.

But as the students board the bus for the return trip up Mass Ave., the sense of empowerment was inevitably accompanied by a ponderous sense of their responsibility. At our age, we can successfully counsel families in need, before choosing our own HMOs. Just imagine the value of our degree, combined with intelligence and energy, in affecting change down the road.

The tired group of newly trained "helpers," overwhelmed by the dizzying amount of information they must quickly absorb, silently rode the bus home to Harvard. I wondered if they shared my inner thoughts. The dinner time dining-hall fare, surely savory baked tofu (again), suddenly did not seem half bad. And the fourth floor, the cramped and overheated double...at least it is home.