May 31, 2000
College-age Mentors Alter Ill Teens’ Views of Future
- by Marcella Bombardieri
When Michael Tang volunteers his time for a disadvantaged, urban teenager, he’s not just another do-gooder college student from an upper-middle class background trying to assuage his “Harvard guilt” before going off to medical school or investment banking.
Tang, a Harvard junior, doesn’t have much positive to say about mentoring programs that send students into poor neighborhoods to teach reading or math for a few hours. “While it’s nice to tutor someone for an hour, helping them with one assignment is not giving them a greater likelihood of graduating from college,” Tang said.
And so Tang volunteers about 25 hours a week. For the past two years, he has been meeting frequently with Michael McQueen, a 16-year-old from Dorchester. McQueen faces the typical obstacles of poverty – born to a teenage mother, he belongs to a one-parent household and attends an underperforming school.
But McQueen also has a problem most urban teenagers don’t. He suffers from sickle cell disease, a debilitating and life-threatening genetic malady that affects people of African descent. He has spent large chunks of his life in the hospital, and often misses school.
Tang helps McQueen learn about his illness, tutors him in his classes, and teaches him about how to get a job, take the SATs, and apply for college. He also takes him out for Chinese food and trips to the Museum of Science, and hosts him for sleepovers at Harvard. Tang calls several times a week, just to check in.
STRIVE (Sickle cell Teens Raising awareness, Initiating change, Voicing thoughts, Empowering themselves) has been a transformative experience for both Michaels.
McQueen, who attends Hyde Park High School, has learned how to prevent the attacks of pain that come with the disease. He has gotten comfortable with computers and improved his reading skills. He has been inspired to try to get into college.
“This program, honestly, it’s the best thing that many of these kids have going for them in their lives,” said Dr. Michael Osband, chief of pediatric hematology and oncology at Boston Medical Center and an adviser to STRIVE.
Osband said the dozen teenage participants in the program are now hospitalized half as often as two years ago. Many who were not headed for higher education are now on a college path. One is going to Bowdoin College next year, and another is in a nursing program.
Yet who benefits more from STRIVE – the teenagers or the college students who work with them – is open to debate.
Tang has changed his major from biology to sociology, fascinated by the link between poverty and public health made by Project HEALTH, the nonprofit group that sponsors STRIVE. He has decided that a medical degree is fine, but only if he uses it to combat social ills.
“Project HEALTH is more important than school. It’s the basis for everything I know, in some ways,” said Tang.
Most, if not all, of the volunteers are similarly affected, said Project HEALTH director and founder Rebecca Onie.
“First of all, it’s great for them just to take the number one bus down Mass. Ave. to Boston Medical Center. Most Harvard kids get off at Hynes Convention Center, and they’ve never seen the rest of the city,” Onie said. “But the most exciting thing they learn is that they can make a difference now, not after a few years consulting, not when they get their MD.”
Onie became frustrated with “the traditional model of undergraduate service” during her freshman year at Harvard in 1994.
“Tutoring is important, but you miss the larger dimensions of that child’s life,” said Onie, a Brookline native. “The volunteer might say, ‘Oh, it was the worst, the kid was falling asleep and not paying attention.’ But does the child have enough food? Is there domestic abuse?”
Onie was inspired by a magazine article about Dr. Barry Zuckerman of Boston Medical Center, who, as chairman of pediatrics, was using hospital resources to help patients qualify for housing, food stamps, or welfare, for example.
Onie was impressed with Zuckerman’s approach, but she recognized a missing element: college students. So she called him and offered help.
She started with 10 volunteers at Harvard. Today, 230 volunteers at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Brown University spend 75,000 hours a year on Project HEALTH. STRIVE is one of at least 15 programs for children, all targeting poor health and poverty.
Project HEALTH is based at Boston Medical Center and receives funding from hospitals, universities, and corporate sponsors.
The idea for STRIVE came from Osband and other doctors, who approached Onie with the notion that mentors could teach chronically ill teenagers, used to relying on their parents, to take care of themselves. The Harvard students design lessons for the weekly STRIVE group meetings on how to avoid crippling pain by, for example, drinking a lot of water or moderating their body temperature.
“My mom explained that before, but I never understood,” McQueen said. “STRIVE is the best place I’ve ever been to learn about sickle cell.”
Sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder that affects one in every 400 to 500 people of African descent, Osband said. It causes red blood cells to become sickle-shaped, which in turn makes them clog blood vessels. When they clot in the bones, they cause pain. When they clot in the brain, they cause a stroke, Osband said.
A decade ago, people with sickle cell tended to live only into their 20s and 30s. Now, with better care and medications available, victims of the disease are living into their 40s, 50s and 60s, Osband said.
Still, though, everything – school, socializing, sports – is harder for these teenagers.
“This is the kind of health problem that really takes over your whole life,” said Harvard junior Kunal Merchant.
Because Shawn Allen, 16, of Dorchester, spends three or four days in the hospital every month, he misses a lot of school. A couple of years ago, he was failing classes. Now, at least in part because of the helps he gets from Merchant, his STRIVE mentor, he’s getting good grades.
School “is getting easier and funner,” Allen said. “When you understand it more, it’s better.”
Project HEALTH helped McQueen get a computer for his apartment. While McQueen’s reading skills are limited (in part due to years of regular absences), Tang finds that he cannot pull the teenager away from the Internet. At one Harvard sleepover, McQueen stayed up all night, surfing for his favorite rap groups’ Web pages.
When he started STRIVE, McQueen told Tang he couldn’t imagine going to college. That has changed.
“I didn’t know no college kids before,” McQueen said. “To hear about how good they’re doing, how the Internet is down there, yeah, it makes me want to go.”
There are plenty of things college students can do for teenagers that social workers and doctors cannot, STRIVE participants said. “We show them that you can be self-driven and ambitious and that’s OK,” Merchant said. “You can still be a normal person and dance and play video games.”
Still, even the teenagers know that the teaching goes both ways. About the Harvard students, Allen said: “Sometimes they’re as smart as us.”