1st Day @ Open Door Mission...

Yesterday was my first day at the open door mission. We spent a little bit of our time there touring the brand new 5 million dollar Lydia house. It was absolutely beautiful. What a blessing to the community. On any given winter night the open door mission would shelter 90 families and have to turn away over 120 more families. The new shelter can house up to 360 families. For many people during this economy, becoming homeless is as close as missing a few paychecks. And with more and more layoffs happening every day, the cost of access to health care growing to astronomical prices and the cost of daily necessities on the rise, it's a very real possibility for many people.

After we toured the buildings we had an opportunity to speak with several key people at length about how and what we can do to help. Myself along with 2 other students have an opportunity to hopefully make an impact in the lives of those effected by homelessness. We are going to be putting together an educational seminar about eating healthy and exercising. Many of the people who live at the shelter receive government assistance in the form of food stamps. I know it sounds unfathomable but many of those same people have never been taught the basics about the food pyramid, reading labels and simple things like making sensible healthy food purchases, and budgeting for groceries. Since the new facility has a state of the art gym as well we thought teaching some basic exercise ideas would be helpful too, since eating right is only one component of staying healthy. We will be teaching the clients basics of staying active, because most likely when they leave the shelter, they will no longer have access to a gym and equipment. At first I thought to myself..."these people are just trying to eat and shelter themselves right now, I'm sure the last thing on their minds are exercising and eating healthy". However, the unique thing about the Lydia house is that the "shelter" is actually comprised of apartment type rooms, complete with a bedroom, bathroom and mini kitchen. So it really is a great place for people transitioning into long term housing to stay at. Once they are back on their feet and working, saving money and moving into long term housing, they will be able to take the knowledge they learned from the staff and volunteers at the shelter and apply it for the rest of their lives. Plus, since the majority of families at the shelter have children and the childhood obesity rate and the correlating diabetes rates are climbing to epidemic rates in this country, we thought these topics were actually vitally important. Although I'm sure that all careers in public service are rewarding, I especially think that nurses and educators (teaching is part of the nursing process and one of any nurses primary jobs) have such rewarding jobs. You get to see your efforts play out when a patient makes leaps and bounds in progress toward their goals. There are so many important things that we could have chosen to do, but as practicing students and not practicing nurses yet, plus with our time constraints (we are only there for a limited number of days), we had to come up with something that would be within our parameters but still be beneficial to the clients.

After seeing and hearing some of the many sad stories at the open door mission, it's just reinforced to me that I am so truly blessed in my life. The things that I complain about are so minuscule in contrast to other's problems. It makes me want to do so much more for the community

This whole opportunity comes at an ideal time for me because with Aaron's help I have made drastic changes in what I buy and prepare and my own exercise regimen. I'm doing cardio atleast 3 times a week at school and am eating 5-6 small snacks or meals throughout the day (no more than 1500 calories a day) to boost my metabolism in order to reach my weight loss goal. The funny thing is after only 2 weeks of this, I can already see and feel the difference! It's amazing. And I'm NEVER hungry, but yet am taking in just enough calories to keep me energized, and speeding up my metabolism but still able to lose weight. I think back to last summer and remember days where I would forget to eat all day...until almost 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon because I was busy or forgot to eat. No wonder I was gaining weight when I was trying to lose it for the wedding! I am slowly adapting to these changes so that hopefully they will be lifelong habits and I will never fall into my "old ways" again!