Lived in Baltimore
Growing up in the Towson area, just over the county line, trips to the inner harbor,
the science center, or Camden yards were semi-regular events. Yet Baltimore City remained
somewhere ‘traveled to’ and not ‘lived in’. At Loyola, through Messina, sociology
professors, Mercy hospital physicians, local Church attendees, York Road community
advocates, loads of books and a few close friends, I learned more about Baltimore
City as a home and community, not as a mere geographical neighbor. I spent the lion’s
share of my first semester learning about the community, strength and diversity of
Baltimore, but I wanted to have the experience of a ‘lived in’ and ‘worked in’ Baltimore.
My first year I began volunteering at Healthcare for the Homeless (HCH) weekly. I
worked at the volunteer desk connecting people experiencing homelessness with reading
classes at Enoch Pratt free library, acquiring bus passes and finding routes for immigrants
trying to get to their hospital appointments. Sometimes, my service involved talking
with a weathered yet vibrant man about local sports. I found many kind and sensitive
souls who had been struggling to secure a house, who had been let down by employers,
friends, and society writ large, yet kept trust in Baltimore as a community.
I carried these experiences while working in Baltimore’s Mercy Hospital as a Health
Outreach Baltimore (HOB) advocate and clinical coordinator. Here I was able to work
alongside my Loyola peers to engage with health equity and racial justice in the healthcare
field. I led conversations on Loyola’s campus on the social determinants of health
and found ways to effect change with the patients we walked with. Aside from our activities
on campus, we would work with young new, and expecting mothers to make their transition
to motherhood easier. I would often spend my time at Mercy filling out applications
for food stamps, free cribs, or car seats, or consoling a mother who miscarried and
didn’t need social resources but rather needed social connection. I felt a better
sense of life, and sometimes death, in the Baltimore community. I continue to volunteer
with Health Outreach Baltimore working with mothers of all races and socioeconomic
backgrounds. I have gained a truer sense of what a diverse community looks like in
Baltimore.
During my four years at Loyola, scholarship grew in its importance. Research in both
the humanities and in biology and biochemistry became a way of using my talents to
address societal needs in a more comprehensive way. I was encouraged to not only ask,
but pursue the answers to large questions I had encountered in college. In the humanities
I researched and presented on the dignity of work in the Catholic tradition. Aside
from the obvious link to Loyola’s Jesuit identity, this pursuit allowed me to understand
the role that dignifying work and labor held in our society. Presenting my work to
fellow burgeoning theologians helped me to connect my academic research to real life
challenges like finding fulfillment in one’s labor, while reinforcing the duty to
protect vulnerable members in my community from being exploited. In a second research
project geared toward understanding how language and faith intersect with someone’s
social identity, I explored the language and historical use of pro-slavery rhetoric
in St. Paul’s scripture.
I complemented this work with rigorous scientific probing of important contemporary
problems, namely, plastic pollution and cancer. I researched and presented on microplastics
in sustainable irrigation systems in an attempt to understand how we as a people can
develop better, healthier, more sustainable options to provide for one another. I
continue to explore this question as I focus more specifically on its effect on humans
as I treat human cells with fluorescently labeled nanoplastics. I have engaged in
research intentionally and with purpose on both Loyola’s campus and at University
of Maryland School of Medicine.
Loyola helped to round me out as a person and inspired me to care for my community
in various ways. It decidedly taught me about Baltimore, its residents, and what ‘home’
meant on campus and in the nearby community, yet it also motivated me to push myself
outside of my immediate area. As a result I took the skills I enjoyed and was good
at (carpentry and construction) and applied them living in an intentional community
at Bethlehem Farm in rural West Virginia each summer during college. I spent each
summer for several months leading retreat groups, participating in sustainable agriculture,
and building homes for low-income homeowners in Alderson, WV. My work each summer
cumulatively totaled over 1,500 hours and amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars
in home repair and new construction. There I learned what socioeconomic diversity
looked like among the under-served of rural areas. I led exclusively low-income home
repair worksites and built roofs, wheelchair ramps, and solar panel arrays for residents
who couldn’t afford repairs. I sat with homeowners displaced by mountaintop removal
mining and heard their stories. When the pandemic hit, I spent the remainder of the
semester and summer serving in this community. As I geared up for junior year, a massive
flood hit Alderson destroying lives and livelihoods. Our home repair organization
responded by dedicating months to flood recovery and rebuilding in Alderson. This
was a longitudinal effort I felt called to lead and I took the entire year off of
school to lead Bethlehem Farm’s flood relief and home repair efforts. Leading a non-profit
low-income home repair program with lots of experience in construction and little
experience as an adult, during the pandemic, proved to be one of the most challenging
experiences of my life, but I leaned on the mentors and support I built at Loyola
to change that corner of the world in small and not so small ways. I made homes more
accessible and livable producing proper repairs that would be able to last decades.
This year of service totaling over 2,500 hours of work enabled me to serve a community
utilizing my skills and interests to improve the safety and quality of life of low-income
Appalachians. Loyola empowered me to make these measurable material and emotional
changes in a community distinct from my campus community.
Through my research, scholarship, and service on and off campus, and commitment to
diversity through each of these pursuits, Loyola, Baltimore City, and I have had reciprocal
effects on each other, bolstering the idea of ‘home’ as a sense of inclusion. Baltimore
has become my home, and my experience at Loyola has been the catalyst for this development.
I plan to enroll in the fall at University of Maryland School of Medicine to continue
my journey of ‘lived in’ and ‘worked in’ Baltimore: a community I have and can continue
to serve, a community of diverse people, and a home in every sense of the word.