By: Angela, Community Engagement Coordinator
The past week of our internship has been one of our most packed experiences so far with many new experiences for Mattan and I, and I feel that I got to experience a closer taste to the usual, pre-COVID pace of this position.
One of the most unique experiences I had was getting to help out with the process of a local pop-up clinic. The first part that we participated in was handing out flyers to notify the nearby community of the clinic happening this week which included loitering around the foodbank of a seniors’ apartment complex and Parma Court itself, which was where the clinic would take place. Two days later, we went to the actual pop-up clinic to continue to distribute flyers around the area, in hopes of bringing in as many people as we could for the last day of the clinic. Although I knew that Victoria Village was considered a high-risk community for COVID, I was still caught off-guard by the amount of people who had not yet been fully vaccinated, or even the people who didn’t know a pop-up clinic was happening right in front of their doorsteps. I am once again reminded of the privilege I have of getting my doses early on. Something as simple to us as booking appointments or complaining about the ridiculous queue to get onto the site may be an inaccessible resource for many others. What may be “common knowledge” of knowing which local centers offer the vaccines or patrolling hospitals’ twitter account for pop-up clinic updates may not be the shared knowledge for newcomers or those who were simply never exposed to this information. I also realize how grateful I am for frontline workers and everyone else behind the scenes who works tirelessly to ensure the safety of the greater good, who constantly reminds us that public safety is a collective responsibility that we have all been given as members of society, and even for those of us who have been fortunate enough to be vaccinated, we still have a responsibility to care for those around us whether its limiting or safely gathering, or encouraging others to do so as well.
With just a little under two weeks left of this internship and summer, I feel like we’ve really entered the reflection stretch of this job, and get to tie the knowledge and skills of everything we learned this summer all together for the finish.