"Normal is just a setting on a washing machine...because being normal always depends on where you are." -Brooke, A ED 225 classmate
In that moment, I was far from normal. If anything, I was permanent press--because seriously who uses that? The moment was over four years ago now, it lasted six weeks, and the experience that I gained then still benefits me to this day. It helped mold my behavior in unfamiliar situations and although I was just 15 years old at the time, it was preparing me for countless similar encounters that I would some day have here at Penn State.
The moment was a summer work program at Providence Hospital in northeast Washington D.C. My dad worked there at the time and had been there his whole life, 36 years, from the time he was just sixteen years old, that was his home away from home. His address changed, his title changed, his life changed; but his place of work remained the same. As you can imagine, after working at one place for 36 years you would get to know a lot of people, but even more people would know you--especially if you were one of the senior directors. So consequently when the extra-wide, automatic sliding doors opened and I entered the old, plain, brown brick building where I would be working for the next six weeks, a lot of people quickly realized that they knew who I was.
It was kind of cool at first, everyone coming up to me all with the same thought on their mind, "Are you Mark's son?" (as if there were only one Mark). So I would quietly nod my head and surprisingly they all had the same response to that too. "I remember when you we're this big!", gesturing with two hands in excitement. I wondered how they could all know me when I knew none of them; it made me feel like I stuck out from the crowd, after all not everyone was Mark's son. But this was not the most distressing part of working there that summer, it was the fact that all of these people who somehow knew me we're of a race other than white. This was not totally new to me; after all I used to live in P.G. county, right outside of D.C., but never before had I experienced such a diverse collection of people from cultures and countries all around the globe. I felt like the most common question that I asked my dad that summer besides, "Are we leaving soon?" was "Where are they from?". I became so curious to learn more about all these different kinds of people. At first I was very timid when talking to new people who were different from me, but in no time I was having lengthy conversations with surgeons from India, nurses from the Philippines, anesthesiologists from Germany, and nursing assistants from Ghana.
In six short weeks, all of these people from all over the world became, to me, not only people who knew me because of my dad, but friends and co-workers from whom I gained invaluable, real-world experience in approaching and interacting with people who we're simply different from me. That experience still helps me today to interact with people of other cultures here at Penn State, a multi-national and multi-cultural university. The biggest thing I realized during my stay at Providence was that no matter how much was different between my co-workers and I, there was far more that we had in common and had I not overcome the initial alienation that I felt, I never would have come to that realization.
