Martha's Table serving some health care lessons

During my time in Washington D.C., we are staying in a hostel place called the William Penn House. 

It is a Quaker based home and the people there are very welcoming and warm.  I got the option to meet a few of the workers at a pot luck in the house and a talk about the Spiritual life of a Quaker woman, Mary. 

Hearing and sharing stories with new people rejected some of the pre-conceived notions I had of Quakers. Mary was an oncologists and performed several abortions when she was practicing. She believed women were educated enough to make their own decisions. An 80 year man in the audience shared his viewpoint, saying how his ex-wife wanted an abortion when they first found out she was pregnant. Coming from a Catholic background, he did not allow that. His son his turning 45 this weekend and is his life and joy. They were very open and acceptive of different opinions. I respect that. 

Another man from the Quaker house told me about a volunteer opportunity during our free half day. So, yesterday, me, Josh from the House, and 9 others from my program volunteered at a Food Bank organization, "Martha's Table."

Martha's Table deals with the immediate effects of poverty and finds long-term solution with education, nutritution and family support services. (http://www.marthastable.org) 

We helped with their grocery service and distrubuted groceries to families of Garrison Elementary School. The school was mostly composed of African Americans and Hispanic families. Each kid greeted us with a big, "HELLO!" 


Depending on the number of children in their family, they received a paper grocery bag and walked around picking a type of canned meat, vegetables, cereal, juice, fruit, and bread, etc. for their family. We stood at different tables to facilitate the choosing and to socialize with the families. 

Some big-booty carrots.

The food available was all donated from target. This experience, not only humbled me but also taught me a lot about our health system.

The United States spends the most on their health care system than any other country BUT has the worst outcomes as well.

There are multiple reasons for that:
(1) the economic system in place, our health care system is very profit-driven.. or should I say, our wealth care system..
(2) it's very dependent on expensive technology,
(3) it's a disease care system that treats symptoms rather than prevents and
(4) it does not recognize the social determinants of health such as your environment, food options, geography, media, and larger forces at work.

So who is getting access to the services that we spend so much money on? Is everyone?

For our Community Health and Research Methods class, we were divided into different communities around D.C. and just observed what was there and what was not there. I was in the area of U-street and focused on the community's access to the medical services and technologies. Interestingly, this was the same area Martha's Kitchen was located. 

Some artifacts that I brought back are pictures of Howard University hospital and a community garden at a park. 



The service of a hospital and presence of healthy food were observations NOT all of my class mates could bring back to our discussions. What is really interesting is the question, just because those services are present in the community does it necessarily guarantee access?


Now back to lady Martha... At Martha's Kitchen, there were some hispanic families who could not speak English. It was sad, because they couldn't even articulate if they wanted oatmeal or cereal. Does that influence their ability to get access? What about financial access? If they couldn't afford groceries how can they afford health care, medications, hospital visits? 

What about your social standards that prevents you from getting care? In a documentary we watched today, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, a man was talking about his acupuncture experience. It helped him get over his addiction to painkillers that he acquired when we was in the military. He said his friends from the South have never heard of it before and wouldn't approve. So what stigmas prevent people from getting access? 

There are so many different disciplines that contribute to the public health of a community and country. To challenge you, what do you first think of when you hear the word "health?" Do you think of bacteria? The human body? Runny noses? Loogies? Most people view health from a bio-medical lens. However, much more goes into an individuals health. 

How did our health system become the way it is today? What kind of change do we expect to see in the upcoming years? 

Anyways, I leave you with a very informative video of the Health Care Reform act that was recently passed.

Loving to learn,
Lynn