It’s No Big Deal (It’s a Big Deal) — July 17, 2014

Kevin Grimes

In this guest post, Kevin Grimes, volunteer site director with Church of the Open Door, shares what it’s like helping youth share time, fun and attitude-changing experiences with residents of Clare-Midtown.

I volunteer with the ‘NextGen’ youth program which visits Clare-Midtown monthly. The NextGen program includes monthly service opportunities for teenagers and young adults from Church of the Open Door.

The students come to Clare-Midtown and join residents for a fun evening of snacks, prizes and games like bingo or Wii. The community room provides a great space and the games are a fun way to break the ice. These visits are a lot of fun for the students who look forward to the event because they get to hang out, meet new people, and play games. In that sense, these events are “no big deal”.

However, the NextGen students may not fully realize that an evening of fun with Clare-Midtown residents can change their attitudes, minds and hearts about people living with HIV/AIDS. That transformation shows up when they reflect on what they’ve learned after a visit.

Students have shared with me comments like:

• “I was surprised at how intelligent he was, and how much we had in common, and how motivated he was to succeed,”
• “The residents were really expressive and open while playing games with us.”
• “I never really thought about people living with HIV/AIDS before, and now I know someone who does.”

From now on, when these students hear about HIV/AIDS in the news or in school, it is no longer an abstract topic about something far away. They have a real experience and connection to someone they personally spent time with.  In this respect, our monthly game time together ‘is a big deal’. To borrow a phrase from a youth pastor, “Don’t under estimate the significance of the insignificant.”

The staff and residents are so friendly and accepting of the student visitors each month that I often wonder if the residents of Clare-Midtown were helping us more than we helped them. On one occasion, the female students and residents were getting so chummy that a woman resident brought her family pictures to share with the students.

Another night we played Wii Bowling and spent extra time with two residents who stayed long enough to feel more comfortable, and who talked a long time about themselves. Hopefully they felt blessed as much as we did, to get to know them and hear part of their story.

My own personal experience as a regular monthly NextGen volunteer site director has been significant, too.  When I found out a year ago that I was going to visit people who live with HIV/AIDS, I had to search the internet to find out my own medical risk for close contact.

You see, I have never been around anyone before who was HIV-positive, and I only knew what I read in the news or saw on TV. I lived through the 70’s and 80’s when not much was known about AIDS except fear and condemnation. There was a lot of false or incomplete information.

However, after spending almost a year in monthly visits to Clare-Midtown, now I believe strongly that people living with HIV/AIDS are not so different from everyone else. They are wonderful people, friendly and inviting who like music, movies and playing games. The residents each have an identity.  Each one is a unique person, not a medical diagnosis, or a number in a clinical statistic.

Of course, there is still more I need to learn about the lives of people who live with HIV/AIDS, their pain and suffering, their struggle for equality and access to care.  But now I know some of them by name, and they have hopes and dreams, family and friends, and once a month they share a smile with me.