Health Care, relationships and more...

So over the past few weeks, it's been so interesting for me to see how many of the organizations that the Urban Fellows are working with interact and work together to meet their own specific missions. I've had multiple meetings throughout the day with other Urban Fellows as we collaborate on different projects for the community, whether it's specifically for NeighborWorks or for another group. Yesterday was the first day for the Westside Farmer's Market, which is the assignment for my roommate, Liz. I was able to go with one of our neighborhood groups of Brooks Landing Healthy Blocks to do arts and crafts with the kids at the market. They made some pretty intense abstract paintings that'll be displayed in the art gallery that I'm organizing for July 1st, so at least we have some definite artwork submitted! (Still working on recruiting artists and a definite location...a bit stressful but a work in progress...) It was really great, though, to see Liz's hard work finally come together on a beautiful day with lots of delicious and fun vendors and see one of our key neighborhoods involved in selling produce and natural healthy foods. All of the kids that came to our table got a free healthy snack, which was delicious fresh strawberries, helping promote healthy eating habits for kids.

Today in our Urban Fellow workshop day we discussed access to health care and started the day with a discussion led by a very strong-opinionated professor from the U of R. He feels VERY strongly (and doesn't hesitate to show it) that universal health care should be implemented in the US by extending the Medicare program to more people. Right now, you cannot have an income of more than $708 a month in NYS to qualify for medicaid. Even if this is true, not everyone gets the coverage. 50 million people in the US are not covered by health insurance and another 50 million are under-insured...clearly something is wrong with the system, but there is no easy solution. Even though many European nations now have universal health care, we can't simply take their system and apply it to the US with such different demographics in our population and many other contrasting features. Even with a universal health care system, there are other issues that come up, like who qualifies (international students studying here for a short period of time or an extended time, immigrants-legal or illegal, etc.) or where the funding comes from to provide health care to all.

We spent the afternoon at AIDS Care, an organization that offers various services to people infected with HIV/AIDS, those affected by it (family members, partners, friends) and the general public. An interesting service that they do is a syringe exchange program where individuals can bring their used syringes and receive new clean ones in exchange. They build up trust with their clients by requiring them to bring back the same number they were given in order to receive the same amount of new ones plus three more. It is a bit controversial - some people claim that it encourages drug usage by providing syringes but the representatives at AIDS Care assert that their goal is to prevent HIV from spreading, not drug usage. Apparently if an individual is involved in this program, they cannot be charged for illegal drug possession, regardless of the laws against possessing heroine. Police are not allowed to patrol near their premises so that their clients are not discouraged from coming to exchange the syringes.

After discussing a bit of the background of the organization, we hit the streets to do outreach. June is HIV Awareness Month and they are holding a free HIV Testing event next week, so we handed out flyers and told people about the event while on the streets. We literally just walked downtown with a small group of us and a leader from AIDS Care with flyers and free condoms to hand out to anyone we encountered on the streets. We had a few interesting experiences. A couple guys in my group walked up to a few boys sitting at a distance and apparently they were in the middle of a drug deal and didn't try to hide it at all when they walked up to them. They gladly accepted what we had to offer and acted as if their drug trade was nothing out of the ordinary and entirely legal. Also, we were talking to a young couple, probably about 25 years old, and the girl accepted the condoms and the boyfriend didn't say anything in response. But when the boyfriend took the condoms, the girl freaked out and threw hers at him and hit him with her purse, yelling at him for various reasons including apparently staring at some of the girls in our group. I found it to be a sad illustration of the lack of trust in relationships in today's society. It was challenging to see this right in front of my eyes, knowing that there are broken relationships, even among couples...so how can others that aren't in a dating relationship count on one another? I definitely don't know much of anything about the couple that we spoke to today, but it really revealed to me the value that relationships can have or can lack. Peoples' definitions and terms of relationships vary significantly in different cultures and I think they differ based on what values individuals cherish and whether that matches up with their partner or not can really create conflict. This was true street education...can't find this in textbooks!