Valentine's Day at Shawn Jenkins Children Hospital
During a normal Valentine's Day, the patients at Shawn Jenkins would be unable to full experience the love from their friends and family due to their illness. In a pandemic-stricken year, this reality that is only exacerbated. While healthy children at home are able to share Valentine's Day cards and fun-size candies with their peers and their friends, the sick patients in Shawn Jenkins are unable to do so and are removed from the joyous annual tradition. That can hurt for a kid. Especially one who is young and in elementary school when staying up the night before filling out all of your cards with your mom and a class list is one of the few excuses to stay up past bed time.
It's not easy being a child in the hospital, fighting a fight that many adults would not be able to, but it's particularly hard when holidays come and go and the traditions and rituals that you look forward to every year pass you by. Seeing who you got a Valentine from and what candy everyone had and maybe a small little toy here and there meant the world when we were young, and many patients at Shawn Jenkins won't be able to experience that this year.
That's where students with Doors to Dream and at Burke High School wanted to intervene. They talked amongst themselves and decided to provide Valentine's Day care packages to as many patients as they possibly could. Even if the bag only contained a Valentine's Day card, some candy, games and puzzles, a custom fortune cookie, and a small toy, they wanted to ENSURE that each child in the hospital they could reach knew that there is an entire community out here rallying around their fight. They wanted the kids who are fighting sickness to know that they are loved, that they are thought of, and that they are supported by people not only in and out of their hospital rooms every day, but here across the city. With these small tokens of joy and support, Doors to Dream students wanted to allow children to have a moment of happiness. They wanted the patients to forget their circumstances, if only for a moment, and enjoy being what they are - a kid.
