Interview Transcript: Interview A Faculty Member
Rebekah Phillips (RP): What types of volunteer work are you involved in?
Dr. Claudia Kittock (Dr.K): “I work at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) on the pediatric ward in the literacy program. The literacy program there, they’ve written a grant, and they give out a free book to every child that enters the hospital. Whether they’re a patient, a relative, a sibling, a visitor everybody gets free books. Then a group of us, at various times throughout the day, will go to the pediatric ward, sit out in the waiting room with a big pile of books and read books to kids.
The other one that I do is that I am a volunteer mentor for women with colon cancer through the American Colon Cancer Association (ACCA). Somebody there assigned me and it is all done through email; never in person. There is one in particular I would like to meet, but she lives in Long Island, New York so we haven’t met yet. The way I craft that is whatever they need. A lot of times I’ll get people at the beginning of their cancer and they want to know about the chemo they want to know about how they’re going to eat, are they going to lose their hair, how are they going to feel, how do they tell their kids; those kind of things. For several of the people we have kept in contact with have died and we would keep with them until their deaths. And sometimes it’s one email and I never hear from them again. It’s not my job to hunt them down; it’s just to be there.”
RJ: How did you come to be involved with the ACCA?
Dr.K: “I am a colon cancer survivor. So at the end of my treatment when I got the all clear I really wanted to do something that would have helped me. I wanted to have something I could do but that I wouldn’t have to go someplace and be physically present. I do find that email is particularly interesting because people are a little freer with email then they might be in person. When you’re talking to people with cancer energy is a huge issue, having to be somewhere at sometime is a huge issue.”
RP: How many emails do you usually receive?
Dr. K: “It depends. One time I had about eight or nine people I was working with, unfortunately now I’m down to one. There has been just a whole spade of deaths of people that I was mentoring. But there will be more coming in.”
RP: How many emails do you send back and forth? Do you have set dates when you send them?
Dr. K: “It depends. It depends on what they need. The one that I still keep in contact with is also cancer free and she and I probably email two or three times a week.”
RP: How long have you been volunteering with the HCMC program?
Dr. K: “Since my sabbatical which was last winter, so it will be coming up on a year.”
RP: How did you get into that volunteer work?
Dr. K: “I called them. We live four blocks away. I looked up their volunteer number and I said I would like to be a volunteer and they said come in. It was a very long process to become a volunteer, it took almost a month.”
RP: Was it a lot of paperwork?
Dr. K: “It was a lot of paperwork, they do a security check, you have to have various physicals, then you have to have tuberculin shots. Especially since I was working on pediatrics.”
RP: Were there any requirements?
Dr. K: “Yeah. You can’t be a felon, that’s for sure. They had lots of jobs and they said what do you want to be, and I said ‘I wanna be a book lady!’.”
RP: Do you enjoy volunteering there?
Dr. K: “I love it. I’m goofy about it. I absolutely adore it; it is the high point of my week. I also love my job teaching, but I get to go read stories to little kids.”
RP: How often do you volunteer there?
Dr. K: “Once a week. Tuesday mornings are my reading day. It is for the morning. I am usually there a minimum of two hours. It is usually two hours, but if I have to leave early, or if there are a bunch of kids sitting there I can stay as long as I want.”
RP: Do you get to pick the stories you read?
Dr. K: “I do, I do. I get to pick the books.”
RP: Do you bring them yourself?
Dr. K: “They have books there, but because I raised two boys and have a house full of children’s books, yeah I do. I kind of know what they are going to like. Two biggies are Where the Wild Things Are, which the boys all adore, and Horton Hatches the Egg, which I must read four or five times every Tuesday morning. The best part is that there are kids who have never read Horton Hatches The Egg and almost always I have a kid who, as I’m turning the pages, I is looking at me after every page and saying ‘he’s gonna break it’. Which I just adore.”
RP: Are there a lot of Spanish speaking children there?
Dr. K: “There are 30 different languages spoken at pediatrics. A lot of times, especially with the immigrant families, there will be an older brother or sister who comes along to translate for the parent. But HCMC has translators for all 30 languages. But when they come with an older brother or sister, then they don’t normally have to wait as long because the kids can translate.”
RP: What do you think motivates you to volunteer there?
Dr. K: “First of all, I really adore kids of all ages. I don’t have a lot of contact with little kids anymore and I miss that. I’m absolutely, over the moon, crazy about reading and the magic of reading and the magic of education. I also spent of significant amount of my time while I was in college working at the pediatrics (pedes) at St. Mary’s hospital which is associated with Mayo Clinic. So I have had a lot of experience on pedes. And I am really comfortable there. It was also a very interesting thing for me to, after my cancer to go to the hospital every week for a good thing.”
RP: Was that hard at first?
Dr. K: “I had anxiety and it wasn’t because I thought someone was going to grab me and start injecting me. But it was just kind of all the associations of oh no, oh no, oh no, here we go again, a hospital. So it has been very good for me in that regard too because now that is not in my mind anymore; it kind of forced me to work through that more quickly. But it’s just for the sheer joy of it; it couldn’t be any more fun, it really couldn’t. If I could get every student I’ve ever had and continue to have, to do a week of it at HCMC, they would be a changed person.”
RP: How do you think your volunteer work differs from your professional work you have done in the past or are doing currently?
Dr. K: “This is pure fun and my teaching is fun, but there are goals I want to accomplish all the time, there is a time table, there are things I need to get through. But reading to kids is just reading to kids. If they get up and walk away during the middle of a book, then they get up and walk away. They’ll come back.”
RP: Do they always come back?
Dr. K: “Yeah, they’ll come back or they won’t. It’s just pure, pure, pure fun. The magic of the story keeps them coming back.”
RP: Do you get a lot of the same kids coming back?
Dr. K: “Yes, they love to come over and say ‘remember me?’.”
RP: Do you remember them?
Dr. K: “I do!”
RP: How long do you read to each of them for?
Dr. K: “I just sit with a bunch of table and chairs, so I can have seven or eight kids or I can have one, whoever is there. It is seldom just one kid; usually there are a number of them. Then they’ll get in fights about which book comes next.”
RP: Do you let them pick the books?
Dr. K: “I always let them pick the books. I say, ‘Here are the books, you choose’. Sometimes if they get called into the doctor before I get to their book, it cracks me up, because they’ll get done with their doctor appointment and they’ll come right back.”
RP: Can you share a favorite story or describe a special moment from your work there?
Dr. K: “My favorite story so far was Emilio. Emilio sat with me for over 90 minutes reading. He was about five, had huge brown eyes, he was adorable, he was funny, he was intelligent, he asked me questions, and he laughed and laughed and laughed at every story. I had to leave before he did. Because HCMC is a public hospital, everybody is seen there so that often means really long waits for some of these kids. So I had to leave and I said to Emilio, ‘I hope you get in to see the doctor really soon,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve already seen the doctor’; I said, ‘What do you mean you’ve already seen the doctor? You’ve been sitting with me for almost two hours’. He said, ‘I know, I saw the doctor first then I told Papa that I wanted to sit and read with you,’ and I said, ‘Where’s your papa?’. That man had sat almost two hours after the appointment was done so that Emilio could read with me! As much as I kept trying to thank the dad, he just kept saying, ‘No, no, this is important. You read to my son, that’s very important. Thank you so much.’
That is my favorite, but my second favorite was the day I left and I was walking down the hall and heard ‘Hey, hey, hey!’. And I turned around and there was a little boy standing in the door waving saying, ‘Goodbye, booklady, thanks for reading to me today!’.”
RP: Do you wish you had more time to spend there?
Dr. K: “It’s about right. They’re little kids and they lose their attention, so it’s about the right amount of time. But I adore it; I would never ever, ever give it up. I love kids.”
