Idealism waning

It's been 89 days of my year of Americorps service and only now do I have enough to write about in a blog. Up til a few weeks ago, my position and duties have been vague, which was nice because no pressure or responsibilities fell on me, but dull because I like to stay busy and get those service hours in. Service hours, Americorps jargon for slave labor, is 1700 hours of service in 10.5 months, which if you do the math right is 40 hours a week without any time off, like, not at all. But since I'm busy now, those hours will fly by even though I'm quite exhausted (hence the witty title"service corpse")

Every week I have a meeting with my supervisor, Michele, and we discuss what projects I'm involved with and what's going on. With the massive state budget cuts going down, she informed me that adult dental services are pretty much totally eliminated. What does this mean, you ask? Well, since our organization is a community health center, we rely on federal and state funding to provide services to our patients and keep our clinics afloat. The majority of our patients are uninsured, unlike private clinics whose revenue is based on insurance reimbursements or cash for services and so we rely on government funding to pay for services provided. Medical coupons, AKA state Medicare, will no longer cover adult dental services, so basically we cannot see Medicare adults at any of our dental clinics,wiping out a large chunk of our already diminishing revenue.

When I was hired, we (Emily and I, another Americorps volunteers)were told our job was to increase the integration between medical and dental patients, try to get pediatric and OB patients to receive services for both. And the idealistic Sam-I-am believed we needed to do this to provide our patients with overall well-being, to make them healthy from every orfice top-to-bottom, for preventive health, to protect the vulernable,to help the neediest of our community! But really, there is solid grant funding for these services, and the more preggos and kiddos we get into the dentist, the more funding we can secure and keep all the programs and employees in our organization running. While the service to the underserved element still exists, the harsh, cruel reality of a time of budget crunching is this- we need money and we will target YOU to get it. Whom is providing the service to whom?

Then Michele shared her experience with her first major disillusionment after she graduated nursing school.Reality is not our ide-ality, as much as our idealism motivated us to get through college, get through gradute school or med school or nursing school, it just doesn't fly in the real world. There is suffering, there is immense poverty and budget cuts everywhere you look and affecting everyone, and to quote the 2010 #1 You Tube viral video star Antoine Dodson "Hide yo' kids, hide yo' wife, hide yo' husband cuz they be rapin' e'rbody."

What's next, you gonna tell me Santa's not real or that puppy kisses don't cure broken hearts? Most of us who are called to service, be it the Peace Corps, Americorps, the seminary, are motivated by some altruistic voice in our heads; a desire to right the wrongs in this already f****d up world. With all the suffering in the world, and perhaps due to the suffering we faced ourselves, we feel an obligation to serve and relieve the innocent from unnecessary suffering. Personally, I find health and social justice to be a teaching of Jesus Christ, to serve my brothers and sisters by making sure they get their flu shots and prostate exams.I guess "medical coupon" is something the Gospel according to Mark lost in its translation from Hebrew to English, or maybe Jesus just straight up forgot to mention it while performing His miracles.

Still, I'm not completely broken. The world keeps chugging along, people come into our clinics and get their care, manage to pay (or evade payment and get a call from collections) and we all live as best as we can. Is it fair that we should aggressively seek children and pregnant women to get their money and redirect it to the office coffee service? No, but at least we got them into the clinic, gave them an excellent, high-quality level of care and we'll see them again in 6 months for another Well-Child check or after another OB visit. Someday we'll be able to get adults back into our dental clinic, but who knows when that'll be and we can't really worry about that now. It's not that we dont care, we do care, we really, really do, but we how can we care if we don't have a job with which to care through?