Duke students learned and served in Marion County

For two months this summer, Marion and Mullins felt a little like college towns. From mid-May to mid-July, 10 students from Duke University lived and worked here as part of the Benjamin N. Duke Scholars’ Summer of Service. Each student served as an intern for a different organization ranging from Marion County Medical Center, Marion County Library, the City of Mullins, and Nichols Head Start.

The basic tenet of the program is community. The interns’ mission while they are here is to dig as deeply as possible into how a small rural county like Marion works. I had the good fortune to have one of the interns, John Deans, work with me in the Office of Community Health at Francis Marion University.

Through my daily conversations with him and frequent interactions with his fellow interns, I followed their exploration of their surroundings. They were unanimous in their praise of the “heapin helping” of hospitality they were accorded.

They succeeded in connecting with residents from all walks of life, from little children to our most prominent citizen. They had City of Marion Mayor Rodney Berry’s family over for dinner and visited Mullins

Mayor Pam Lee at her restaurant, The Pizza Shak (Mayor Pam, true to form, refused to let any of the students pay for their meals).
Of course, this kind of experience is always a two-way street, and it would be hard to decide who got the better end of the deal, Marion County or our guests from Duke. Running into three or four of them in a grocery store or a restaurant made me wish we had a stronger college presence in Marion. This group brought energy, imagination, and a fresh perspective to our quiet streets.

In addition to the 30 hours of free labor they provided at their internship sites, they added to our community in several important ways. As John Deans’ preceptor, I was the recipient of a load of his cogent questions every day. I would wager. I answered (or tried to answer) a thousand of his queries during his stay here, ranging from what chicken bog was to what I thought about Obama’s health care plan.

And I suspect that each preceptor had a similar experience. As the interns asked us questions about our community it forced us to look at it through their unbiased, young eyes and see things we had never seen before.

One of the students, Khadijah Bhatti, led the group in making a more tangible impact. She worked at Fresh Start, a residential program for teenage girls with addiction. Khadijah spoke eloquently about their broken homes, how many obstacles they faced and the frustratingly little difference she felt she made in just eight weeks with them.

Many of the girls live at Fresh Start for months, so Bhatti latched on to a way to continue to influence the girls’ lives even after she left. She persuaded the rest of the Duke group to paint the cafeteria of the old school in which the program is housed as their service project. She even enlisted the girls themselves.

Now, at every meal, the girls are reminded of Khadijah and her friends, and how much they cared.

These students serve as powerful role models for our county’s children as they look to the future. I spent several evenings talking with the group about how they managed to win scholarships to one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Their answers were surprisingly simply. “My parents encouraged me.” “I worked hard.” “I want to make a difference.” All were the kinds of responses that I heard.

What I discovered was that most of this crowd are not geniuses. They are young men and women whose parents valued education and who internalized that value early on. Most of the students were keeping up with their assignments and not falling prey to distractions.

Many of Marion County’s children could emulate them if they would follow that simple prescription.