Week 1: Dorm Crew
Thrown into a pile of dust and grime, I was told to make it clean. Each day we took off another layer of dirt, moving from the top floor down. The complete procedure consisted of five steps: trashing, sweeping, damp dusting, dry mopping, wet mopping. There’s a lot of cleaning terminology, and whenever our team talked to one another about what we’d been doing or what we needed to do, the vocabulary made me feel like we were playing a game.
I liked the physical process of watching the dust bunnies disappear and making the wooden floors visibly shinier. There’s such gratification in being able to see quantifiable results. There’s almost a false sense of control. Scraping corners with hand brushes and attempting to scoop every last bit of dust made me think of what Steph says about the neverending fight against entropy. We collect dust so that dust could collect again, but somehow there’s slight pleasure in that.
Week 2: Day Counselor
Watching over a group of 9-10 year olds for a few full days was exhausting, but so much fun. I ended up with a group of all girls. Very different personalities, but they got along well together and, thankfully, with me. It surprises me how naturally and easily kids give their affection, and how nice it feels to be on the receiving end, when they hold your hand not because they have to cross the street but because they want to belong to you.
I liked the simple act of taking care of their basic needs. It reminded me of the talks Drew and I had during those five-hour chemistry labs, about that persistent question, why medicine? People never ask me that because there are so many common explanations, but I don’t think it’s at all a straightforward answer. One thing we talked about was how you’re taking care of people on such a basic level. I’m not sure why but it was so fulfilling to have a snack ready when the kids were hungry, and making sure they had enough water throughout the day, and putting on their jackets when they were cold. Not to downplay the frustration induced by constant pleas to repeatedly ride the teacups, inquiries about the time every two minutes, refusals to compromise, and the inability to get along with boys. Tired but not defeated, is how I would describe the counselors.
One of the best parts of the job was that I got to participate in all the kiddie activities. We went to Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire, saw the Lions of the Kalahari at the Museum of Science’s Omni Theater, Fenway, the Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, and we had field day and a dance on campus.
Most of all I liked getting to know them. It made me think a lot about what I was like as a kid, and what really happens as you grow up.
Row 1: Lizzy, Grace, Annie
Row 2: Lindsay, Hope
Row 3: Anna, Weezie, Sarah
The girls in one word, and in some sentences:
Lizzy: Independent. She was the most difficult one to watch, because she’d always stray from the group, and wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t walk faster or slower than everyone else. She wouldn’t let me do anything for her. Whereas the other kids were always asking me to do things for them, she insisted on getting her own food and drinks, and she even wanted to walk home by herself. When she did need help—like when she got locked out of her room—she rarely admitted it. She would always say, it’s fine, when it clearly wasn’t, something that I do all the time without realizing how unproductive that is. I feel like she’s going to grow up to be Cora Munro, as played by Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans, because she’s so strong-willed and smart. She also had a younger, blonde-haired sister named Daisy who was less mature and more innocent, just like Alice Munro. Anyway…she made me rethink the things people, myself included, do in the name of independence.
Grace: Delicate/fierce. The things I love the most seem to embody this dichotomy, so I have a soft spot for Grace. She had this amazingly sweet voice, as though she was giving you a gift every time she spoke. She told me she liked tunnels; she liked how it became dark and “how you went through them.” She was the smallest one and seemed the most fragile, but she was the only one brave enough to go on the big rollercoasters at the amusement park. She was quiet and reserved, but she was intense about things she cared about. She had a younger brother, and at one point he was wandering off. The other girls tried to get Grace’s attention, yelling her name over and over, but she was so intent on watching over her brother that she didn’t even hear them. The girls gave each other nicknames and Grace was “Shinny,” a combination of shy plus skinny. Needless to say, I empathized with her, not that she ever saw herself as being at a disadvantage, which made me love her even more.
Annie: Tough. She’d broken her arm a week before she got here, and her parents didn’t even know until they arrived in Boston. She was still up for all the games and was really athletic. She never complained when she was thirsty or hungry; she didn’t seem to like acknowledging vulnerability. But being an animal-lover and vegetarian, she was frightened by the images of lions hunting prey at the Museum of Science and clung to me during the entire hour. To feel safe enough to admit your fear—it’s a rare feeling, one that I was grateful she could have, and one that I’m only beginning to let myself experience.
Lindsay: Adorable. This girl must be the cutest thing that ever existed. She wasn’t even one of my kids, but every morning when she arrived at our meetingplace I would wish that she was in my group. I was lucky enough to get a chance to spend time with her at the dance because as I was trying to get some of my more relunctant kids to dance, she happily joined in. Don’t let the cute pixie face fool you—this girl can really move and was my favorite dance partner. Later, when she told the other girls that she lived in London, she consented to saying “cheerio” in a British accent, and I so wanted to take her home to keep.
Hope: Introspective. She lagged behind the others, because she kept stopping to look at a pile of rocks or a random stick or a bird underneath an obscure tree. When I asked her about it, she said she liked “being a tourist.” When we played MASH, she wanted to be a scientist, geographer or world explorer. She only stayed for a day, but the next few days I found myself accidentally stopping the group to look back for her, only to see little things she might have been looking at if she had actually been there.
Anna: Beautiful. She’s a halfie and the prettiest eight year old ever. I told her I could see Kristen Kreuk in her. Amy says the most beautiful thing about people is when they don’t know their own beauty, and I see that in most kids, because they haven’t come to the point of self-awareness yet. Even more so in Anna, because she was the messiest, most accident-prone one in our group. She kept spilling things on her clothes, and the first day at the amusement park she scraped her arm and legs and injured her foot (her nickname was Boo-Boo). She was entirely oblivious to these external blemishes, and she gave no thought whatsoever to preserving an outer appearance, which made her all the more beautiful. She also had really small hands that were wrinkled and looked like they had been burnt. When one of the other kids asked her what happened to them, she said, “Nothing happened. I was born that way,” and smiled. When I think of her beauty, I think of her hands before anything else.
Weezie: Spunky. A million personalities piled into one active body. Weezie was the first of my kids who I met, and she was wearing one blue sock and one green sock when I met her. She spoke a mile a minute, and you had to pay attention because amidst the usual nonsensical kid talk she would say the most insightful things. When I spoke to her, I never doubted that she understood what I was saying. She encouraged me to be a photographer because photographers capture what other people think are pretty but don’t think to capture, and she told me that college is about experiences, and that being a doctor is about being nice. When nine years of life can give me so much, it makes me wonder at how much she’s going to give the world in the future.
Sarah: Precocious. She would pick up on things that adults think children don’t notice, and that’s the thing with kids. They notice everything. Seeing and understanding are different. We think that just because they might not understand something, they’ll ignore it, when really, they’re just taking it in, storing it and unraveling it later.
Week 3: HMS Premedical Institute
So for five days we worked with a simulator named Stan (short for “Standard Patient”) whose heart beat and lungs breathed. Without much instruction they told us to take care of him. We had to figure out what was wrong, and then we had to fix it. It was both an intellectual process and an emotional endeavor. It sounds simplistic, and that’s the fault of my expression, but I’m not sure the mechanics of it would really convey what it was like.
We performed practice surgery (virtual reality), and the idea of having to navigate the human body was simultaneously familiar and foreign (we all thought: Magic School Bus!). It’s funny how little you know about your own physical self. Then I got an ultrasound. How weird and awesome is that, to be able to see your insides on a screen? The doctor confirmed that I didn’t have gallbladder or kidney stones. Then I saw my heart for the first time. I had to hold my breath in order for it to show up, and I almost forgot to start breathing again. It was beautiful, in the way that art is beautiful. You begin to see everything as organic creations and programmatic systems at the same time, and it’s mind-blowing.
The group of people also made it really fun. I got to know my blockmates in a different way, and other Harvard people better, and people outside of our school. Being pre-med means that you’re often categorized by certain mentalities, certain courses of study, certain manners of doing things. It was nice to get at more meaningful ways of connecting people interested in medicine—a particular passion for people, for solving things, for being challenged.
On the last day they gave us a book called “On Doctoring.” It’s a compilation of stories, poems and essays on medicine, patient care, illness, death. The first thing I read was the last paragraph of the introduction: “Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.’ Both medicine and literature have the capacity to affect the quality of the human day. Resonances between these two disciplines offer us a unique view of the human condition that neither one alone can provide.” Ever since freshman year, after that brief but significant interaction with Artichoke, I’ve been reading a lot by and about William Carlos Williams. The figurehead for the doctor poet. The book includes a lot by him and by so many other writers I love and admire, and I was touched by how fitting an ending to the week the book was.
WCW writes, “The physician enjoys a wonderful opportunity actually to witness the words being born. Their actual colors and shapes are laid before him carrying their tiny burdens which he is privileged to take into his care with their unspoiled newness. He may see the difficulty with which they have been born and what they are destined to do. No one else is present but the speaker and ourselves, we have been the words’ very parents. Nothing is more moving.”
It’s amazing how long it’s taken me to come to a very simple conclusion, or to jolt myself into consciously knowing what my fingertips have always sensed. I want to take care of people, and I want to write. The how part will come later.
Week 4: Project HEALTH
I moved into Eliot House on Saturday. What a difference a five minute walk makes. Living here feels different from Adams in so many ways. We have neighbors, other houses. My room looks into the courtyard, our common room looks out on the river. It gets so quiet as you walk down Dunster St. away from the bustle of the square toward the cove of river houses. It makes me feel like I’m sharing a secret—with who, I don’t know.
Organizing the Summer Policy Institute for Project HEALTH has been a lot of work, and I hope it goes well. Though a bit intimidated by the responsibility, I like having the control to shape an entire program. Just in preparing for the weekly speakers, I’ve learned so much. There are so many people out there working on ways to improve other people’s lives, and even though the sheer number and immensity of problems that exist is daunting, it makes people’s desire to help so admirable. A bit more on this later, coupled with a movie update (which actually do relate).
It’s nicely surprising how different your life can become even when you remain in the same physical space. Harvard in the summer is nothing like Harvard during the school year, and not just because my classes haven’t started yet. The long days induce warm laziness. With less students you notice a different flow of people through the square. There are so many trees here. I can’t stop looking at them. Of course we have a lot of trees in California, but they’re not clustered quite in the same way. The palm trees in front of my house are always there. Boston trees seem to revive, all at once; they make you aware of their presence, as light and airy as they are. It’s a sudden discovery, but quiet at the same time. I try to think of ways to describe them, but I can only fall back on the simple, familiar, stock adjectives. Green and leafy. The funny thing is, these generic words suffice. Every time a season starts I’m convinced it’s my favorite season, so right now I’m in love with summer. The beginnings are so sweet.
