Written by Avery Britt ’22
The Global Health Fellows had an extremely productive and fun last full day. We started our morning driving to the foodbank hub where we would alternate our time between checking onions for soft spots and mold and assisting the customers as they shopped for their food. My day started in the kitchen with the onions, checking their viability so that we could set them out for the people at the food hub. Our group may have started out a bit rocky (confused by what classified a “good or bad” onion), but once we were told to peel off the first layer of the vegetable in order to see its potential mold spots, the whole group sped through our large bags of onions. We even found what we deemed to be the “perfect” onion. Precisely onion-shaped, without a single bruise, and glaring white, it outshone all the rest of the onions by miles. However, our fun with onions had to be cut short in favor of a much better time helping the people at the foodbank hub fill up their grocery bags or boxes! I got the chance to talk with so many interesting people by lending them my hand to carry their groceries. One of the coordinators even said that the box I was helping carry would go to a woman in labor with her 13th child!
After the foodbank, we headed to lunch in Eastville, where we got the chance to eat adjacent to one of the walking sites set out by Eastern Shore Healthy Communities. Our next stop wasn’t too far away from our luncheon. We drove to Eastern Shore Rural Health’s Eastville Community Health Center and received a tour from two doctors and a coordinator there. Honestly, I had never seen such a centralized hub for medicine before. They had offices for family practice, dentistry, pharmacy, and more all under one roof! I wish I had something like this near my house so my dentist and doctor wouldn’t be 20 minutes apart.
As our time with Eastern Shore Rural Health concluded, so did our interaction with new organizations on the Eastern Shore. I hope we can keep in contact with all the great programs that we have seen on the Shore, and hopefully they’ll become integral parts of the greater network of Norfolk Academy community connections.
Now, our free time! Roy very kindly drove us to the beach to spend our last sunny day enjoying the warm water, playing spike ball (a game at which this blogger far from excels), and soccer. The ‘23s and the ‘24s stayed there for almost two hours, but we ‘22s had to return to our condos to get ready for a grilling extravaganza! Via a concerted effort, the ‘22s cooked burgers, veggie burgers, and hot dogs for all of the fellows (there never was a tastier burger).
Post- dinner the group divided into our case competition groups for our last time before we present our pitch to win the competition. By the time we finished with the case, our adult leaders had kindly prepared us some s’mores to cap off the day! Following the delicious s’mores, the group sat down to debrief with ANCHOR (Appreciations; News; Concerns; Highlights and Hopes; Observations; Reflections). We ended with a candle circle during which each of us shared what we learned this week (about ourselves, about global health, about the Shore) that we will take with us into this upcoming year. As today was his last day with us, Bryan handed out all of the World Leadership School t-shirts to us commemorating our time with him on the Eastern Shore.
It was the perfect cap to the perfect week, and I am so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to spend these five days with some of the greatest people in the world!