| Projects that Touch the Heart
By Carol A. Mellow
For Laurie Anderson and Marty Marino, college is not just about improving themselves; it is also about helping others — something they’re able to do through RVCC’s service learning program.
Service learning is a teaching strategy that combines community service and classroom instruction. It teaches civic responsibility and strengthens the community as well as enriches the participant.
For students like Anderson and Marino, service learning is a rewarding experience worth its weight in gold. Both said they wouldn’t trade their experiences for anything.
Anderson is nearing the end of her third service-learning project. She is participating for extra credit in her Current Moral and Social Issues class with Professor Kelly Nicholson. Like many RVCC students, she chose to repeat service learning because of the excellent experiences she has had.
A human service major, Anderson is very passionate about her experiences with Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, a program for girls ages 7-18 whose mothers are incarcerated at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Union Township, N.J. For the past two semesters, she has chosen this service-learning opportunity.
“I really fell in love with the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program because I would be in direct contact with girls and moms who need help,” said Anderson enthusiastically.
The girls, almost 30 in number, meet twice a month. The first meeting takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the first Saturday of the month at the Girl Scout Council building on Lamington Road. There they engage in typical Girl Scout activities and programs, such as career development for the older girls and money-handling skills for the younger ones. The second meeting is held the third Saturday of the month from 9 to 11a.m. at Edna Mahan. “This meeting is a total connection (of the girls) with their moms. They get to say hello and catch up with each other,” Anderson said.
“At the first meeting I attended” at the correction facility, explained Anderson, “there was a little girl whose mother had lost her privileges, so she couldn’t come to the meeting, and we were making lady bugs. She said to me, ‘My mom can’t come. Will you make this with me?’ I personally had to fight back tears, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ So I sat down and made it with her, thinking the whole time about my mom and thanking God that she was who she was and thinking about my own child and thanking God I’m here for him.”
Marty Marino is a nursing major and another enthusiastic service-learning participant.
He chose the service-learning option as a part of his Child Psychology class with Professor Dana Nelson.
Marino said he wanted direct contact with patients in a clinical setting rather than with children in an educational setting. He was enthusiastic because he got to see first-hand the different stages of child development that he learned about in class. More important, he works with patients and parents who appreciate his kind of personal contact.
Marino is a play-therapy volunteer at the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology clinic of the Institute for Children with Cancer and Blood Disorders at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, N.J.
“Every week I go there for three hours and play in the outpatient pediatric playroom,” Marino said. “The kids are from ages 2 years up to adolescents who have been diagnosed with either some type of cancer or a blood disorder. These children may be in for preadmission testing, receiving IV therapy or just in for a check-up. I’ll go around and introduce myself to a patient and their parent and tell them that I’m a play-therapy volunteer from Raritan Valley Community College. Then I explain that this is a part of my service-learning requirement for the Child Psychology class, which I am taking as a prerequisite for nursing.”
Marino organizes activities and plays with the kids. The kind of activity depends upon what the child wants to do. The pediatric playroom has computer games, video games, DVDs, card games, board games and art projects. “I enjoy working with the kids, and this gives the parents a time to just read a book or just be by themselves while their child is occupied and safe,” Marino said.
One play session that Marino will always remember involved a little boy. “We were playing a particularly long matching card game. I could see he was getting bored and actually I was getting a little bored. I asked him if he wanted to play a different card game and he just said no real quietly. Then he looked up a few seconds later and said, ‘You know why I like playing this long game? I’m hungry and I’m going for a spinal tap and I can’t eat for six hours. So if I play this long card game I don’t think about being hungry.’ I was speechless,” Marino said.
Marino will continue serving until the end of the semester, even though he has long since completed the required hours. “This service-learning project is the highlight of my semester,” he said.
Anderson and Marino are very satisfied with their experiences and highly recommend service learning to anyone thinking about participating in the program. Both find their lives enriched because they were able to touch the lives of others in such positive ways and contribute to the well-being of the people they want to work with after they graduate.
Service-learning experiences are as varied as the students who participate in them. These are just two examples of the many wonderful choices that await those who volunteer.
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