My friends and I always joke about Fort Worth being "The Bubble." The bubble consists of the three main private schools, Country Day, All Saints', and Trinity Valley. Most people who go to these schools belong to Colonial Country Club, Shady Oaks Country Club, Rivercrest Country Club, or Ridglea Country Club. The neighborhoods that are acceptable to live in are Mira Vista, Westover Hills, Rivercrest, Crestwood, Monticello, and Montserrat.
In Fort Worth, it is SO easy to be sucked into the materialistic world of the people in the Bubble. However, I have still met many wealthy people in Fort Worth who are unbelievably kind and generous people. Because of these wonderful people and growing up in a homogenous bubble of wealthy, white people, I chose to study nursing here at TCU.
At All Saints', we were required to do at least ninety hours of community service hours during our high school experience in order to graduate. My mother, a medical technologist at Cook Children's Medical Center, suggested that I become a junior volunteer at Cook Children's so that I could easily meet this requirement. I was accepted to the junior volunteer program the summer before my freshman year of high school and immediately fell in love with volunteering and eventually with the hospital itself. I spent six years volunteering with Cook Children's and will start my seventh summer with them in May. Volunteering at the hospital really opened my eyes to true diversity that I had been shielded from at my private school. However, without those required community service hours from All Saints', I don't think I would have ever chosen to volunteer and realized my passion for, well, showing compassion in the hospital setting. I was so blessed to be born into a family with a hard working father who could afford to send me to a private school and to surround me with more opportunities than I could ever have imagined. I am also incredibly blessed to have experienced hardships and pain within my family because it made me understand myself and others a lot more than some of my friends can. I guess it gave me a sense of empathy toward people and really humbled my opinion of people who are not like me. After volunteering at Cook Children's for three years, I really felt like God was tugging at my heart to follow my dream of missions work. After my fourth summer in Guatemala, I dream of using my future TCU nursing degree to team up with a medical missions program and provide health care for those in need.
Because I grew up in the bubble, I gained the qualities I need to follow my calling to be a nurse and to help those in need. If I had lived somewhere else, I know that I would not be the same person that I am today. I also don't know if I would have ever considered doing medical missions if I hadn't been required to volunteer. Through volunteering, I realized how much nursing and other medical professions can make a profound difference in the lives of less fortunate people.
Photo Sources: http://www.luxuryhomemagazine.com/media/press.cfm?id=183
http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/cook-children's-medical- center-6741425/photos
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