What Activism means.

SJ: This quote for me is the best articulation, and it is something I go back to , I have it pasted up here on the wall and it’s something I go back to and read on a regular basis. He [Martin Luther King Jr.] says;

If you want to be important wonderful,

If you want to be recognized wonderful,

If you want to be great wonderful,

But recognize that he who is greatest among you will be your servant,

That’s a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing I like about it;

by giving that definition of greatness it means that everyone can be great

because everyone can serve.

You don’t have to have a college degree to serve,

You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve,

You don’t need to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve,

You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of Relativity to serve,

You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in Physics to serve,

You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love and you can be that servant.

SJ: That is my favorite quote on service because I think he just sums it up right there. You don’t need anything special you just got to go out and do it.

(Sarah John speaking on activism)

SJ: You know that’s and interesting question because I grew up in a service family, so it was not activism or what I would call social responsibility or social justice. It is not something I ever really realized I was doing, it was just kind of what my family did. We never really made a big deal about it; you know it was just what you do. You know as I realized that, and people have asked me that question and I have had to kind of think about it and come to articulate a definition or an answer, I think it means a lot of things. I think it means turning of the water in the shower when I’m soaping up, if I can, if I remember to. I think it means trying to use less, I think it means driving a car that doesn’t guzzle 10 gallons of gas to the mile. I think it means exercising and eating less. I think it means caring for the people who society has forgotten about.

Activist work

(Sarah on studying in India)

SJ: I didn’t go on a Hollins program because I wanted to go to India and we didn’t have the program. I went on a joint program from Emory University and University of Virginia, and we went to Rajeaton, India. And I was there the first semester of my junior year and actually stayed on for Jan term and I arranged to do a kind of teaching internship down in South India where I think my grandfather went to this school, or I had some sort of family connection. So I had arranged to do this sort of teaching internship there. And I wound of staying for about six months total and my mom came out and we ended up traveling together for a couple of weeks and you know my mom was born and raised in India for the first eighteen years of her life and she had not been back to India since she was eighteen. And when she visited me she would have been fifty two or fifty three years old. So she hadn’t been back in over thirty years. So it was a pretty remarkable trip, when my mom left India they didn’t have autos or anything. So it was a whole different place. But I had a really good experience. Actually that is where I meet my husband.

BR: Oh, wow.

BR: What was he doing in India, the same?

SJ: We’ll yeah he was in the study abroad program and he was a history major and was interested in Indian history. He always said it was because he was interested in Indian food [laughing] he would say, I just wanted to eat, I liked the food.

BR: [Laughing]

SJ: I think it was a real bonding experience for us to meet in a foreign country and travel and get to know each other in that context. I think it says a lot about a person, I knew if he could go there and handle that then he would be the right person for me.

(Sarah on working in a local jail while at Hollins)

BR: I was going to ask you about when you were teaching at the local jail, what was that like?

SJ: I really enjoyed it. You know I think in retrospect it really guided my life in a way that I didn’t realize that it would. Because I got in there and I had never really had exposure to that population. And the prison population, you know, is largely a lot of behavioral problems and people with psychiatric disorders and things like that. And you know I got in there and I really enjoyed working with those people and I realized that I was interested in working with people who were in crisis in some way or who were struggling in some way. And then I wound up taking that job teaching behaviorally and emotionally challenged children, you know, youth. And now I work as a psychiatric nurse at a stabilization facility [laughing] who are really crazy people. So I think it definitely guided me and it’s interesting because the population that I serve now in my nursing job is very similar the prison population. In fact many of the people we see or have seen have been in and out of prison, after they have finished treatment with us or they are going to jail or they have come from jail. So…a lot of them are uninsured or Medicaid patients or Tricare, which is the insurance provided to veterans of war. We do see a good number of veterans and a lot of them are court ordered to psychiatric care. So they are there for some sort of stabilization. So we see a lot of sick people. You know people who are acutely psychotic or uninsured; many of them do not have family support or resources.

(Working with children with disabilities)

SJ: When I graduated from Hollins, I decided to take a teaching job in the Washington D.C. area and I taught for 5 years. Taught high school for 5 years from 2000 to 2005 and I worked with kids who have sort of emotional and behavioral problems, so that's anything that ranges from like Autism to Aspergers syndrome to drug abuse or alcohol abuse to behavioral modification that kind of stuff. I worked with those kids for 5 years and I really really loved that work and while I was doing it I got really interested in women’s health and just health in general, and  I’m not really sure where that came from, I think partly Hollins and being introduced to certain key aspects of women’s health when I was at Hollins…and then also just being a teacher and being witness to the horrible health of so many of my students.

(Sarah on starting a volunteer doula service in D.C.)

SJ: So I got training as a labor and delivery doula and while I was in D.C. I started a volunteer group with doulias that served teenage moms and uninsured and underinsured woman. We would meet with them in their homes and kind of do a pre-assessment and then we would go and labor and deliver with them and then follow up with them; and so it was an interesting role. You know we weren’t really clinical and weren’t really social workers we were just kind of support people who were there you know an extra person to help these women try and get the services that they needed and get the support that they needed.

BR: Right

SJ: And some of the women I worked with I mean, they didn’t have anyone there but me at their delivery. You know, the only person, except one of the women I was working with…. she… was the daughter of a Haitian immigrant… she was 21, she was the oldest woman I have ever worked with. She actually had an high school education which was unusual and she was having her third baby, at 21…and she was actually living with her mother in this small one bedroom apartment and her two other children and she was pregnant and hiding that pregnancy from her mother who said she would kick her out of the house if she found out she was pregnant. And so when I went to labor and deliver with her I was the only person there and she was actually planning to give him up for adoption and then she changed her mind and kept him….it was sad.

The Future

SJ: I’m still in it.[The Nursing program at Emory] I’m in the last year of the program right now. So, I came down in the fall of 2005 and I started my program, and it’s a three year program all together. In three years you become a registered nurse at the beginning, and so I’m a registered nurse right now and then you do a masters degree and at the end of it you take boards and you become a nurse practitioner. So I should throw in there somewhere that I had come down to Emory for this program with the intention of becoming a nurse midwife and then actually decided to do something different. And decided to switch to this program that’s called the emergency nurse practitioner program. So I will be licensed as a family nurse practitioner but then I will also be licensed to work in the emergency room.

BR: Do you plan on working in a practice or working in an emergency room?

SJ: I will probably do both. It really depends on where the opportunity is. I think the emergency room is a really good place to get exposure to a lot of different kinds of diseases...I mean, you just see everything in the ER. You see everything from really basic primary care, like earaches, stomachaches, conjunctivitis, sore throats, and things like that... to people coming in with collapsed lungs, heart attacks and strokes, and massive brain injury. I’m not as interested in the trauma... trauma is not really my cup of tea…I’m more interested in seeing the primary care that comes to the emergency room. It’s a really good place to serve the poor because that’s where so many of the poor and uninsured go for all of their health care they go the emergency room.

BR: Right

SJ: So that’s part of why I picked that program, and so I will be doing care in the ER. And then I will also function as the primary care provider in the community setting.

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