WHAT LESSONS HAVE BEEN LEARNED TO IMPROVE MEDICAL SCHOOL? 2020 MCMS Medical Student Essay Contest Winner
“We are all waves in the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.”
S
tanding in the hot Arizona summer sun, together with dozens of volunteers giving up their Saturday to help sort a parking lot’s worth of donations to be shipped to the Navajo Nation, I was reminded of this quote, often attributed to Seneca, that was inscribed on the shipments of masks donated by a Chinese company during the peak of Italy’s COVID-19 crisis. Young and old alike, we all stood with sweat dripping around the contours of our masks,
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ARIZONA PHYSICIAN | Fall 2020
placing bags of rice, beans, canned food, toiletries, and more into boxes for shipment to our Navajo neighbors. The collective community effort to amass the tons of donations itself was impressive – an hour into the shift, there was barely space to walk with all the boxes of donations that had been unloaded to be sorted. Despite the fact that grocery stores and supply chains had been disrupted for all of us, people were still giving what they could with such open arms. As I watched a five year old boy who struggled to spell “donation” on the sorted boxes instead master the tape gun and use his talents to help create an endless supply of pre-assembled boxes to hand off to the other volunteers who dug through the donations to assemble care packages, I smiled. This was just one of the many times during the
