‘Guardian Angels’ Step Up as First Responders, Good Samaritans on the Front Lines
Elvira Mata
Elvira Mata was born with a physical disability that causes swelling and pain in the joints of her fingers. The second-year student at Hostos Community College works as a senior nurse attendant, caring for patients with COVID-19 in a Bronx hospital. Despite her condition, she’s able to lift and bathe her patients, the expressions of desperation and fear on their faces causing her adrenaline to rise and her agony to subside.
“Before I go to work, I have pain,” says Mata, who was diagnosed as a young child with boutonnière deformity. “But when I see that the patients need me, I can move more freely. I love seeing their smiles when I help them and they feel better.”
Mata is also dealing with tremendous personal heartache after her father, a taxi driver, died of COVID-19 on April 4. Her mother was also infected and endured a lengthy period of recovery. That both her parents were touched by the virus makes the disease more personal to her, and she sees her hospital patients in more intimate terms. “I always do my best to help them,” she says.
Mata exemplifies a standard of public service that is not uncommon among students at the City University of New York, an intense drive to help their communities persevere in the face of a crisis despite their own challenges and personal losses. They are nurses and medics, National Guard members and good Samaritans who have made significant contributions while balancing demanding course loads.
“I am humbled by the bravery and sacrifice of these CUNY heroes — they have put their own well-being on the line and dedicated their time to assist in the response to the pandemic,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “They are exemplary ambassadors of the University, offering expertise and ingenuity in their fields and embodying CUNY’s mission to help one another so we all can move forward together. They are the University’s guardian angels, and I applaud their commitment to public service.”
Mata relies on a network of support programs at CUNY for students with disabilities to help her navigate her busy schedule and manage personal issues that come up. CUNY counts more than 11,000 students with disabilities across its 25 campuses. There is an Office of Disability Services on each campus, and students support one another through the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities (CCSD).
Luis “Junior” Alvarez
Another student, Luis (Junior) Alvarez, is president of the CCSD chapter at Bronx Community College and organized virtual activities for students with disabilities during the pandemic, including weekly club meetings and movie nights on Zoom. Alvarez, who copes with anxiety, depression and dyslexia, also led a workshop on how to set up a Zoom account, and he found all of these ways to help other students while mourning the loss of his pastor, a person he considered part of his extended family, who died of causes related to COVID-19.
Here are just a few stories of sacrifice, commitment and selflessness that illustrate how CUNY students have stepped up to help New Yorkers during the COVID-19 crisis:
Comforting Those in Distress
Adam Kern was tired of reading about ways to help patients. The Queensborough Community College nursing student wanted to put his lessons to use in the midst of the pandemic. “I had to do something,” said Kern, recalling that he was at the University of Colorado during the 9/11 terrorist attacks and felt powerless to assist his fellow New Yorkers. He didn’t want to experience that feeling again.
Adam Kern and Kristen Rodriguez
The Bayside, Queens, resident started volunteering at Parker Jewish Institute in New Hyde Park, in early April, shadowing nurses and assisting with patient care. A day later, with the pandemic inching toward its apex, he was offered a part-time paid position as a student nurse at the 527-bed rehabilitation center, a job that would put him in close contact with elderly COVID-19 patients. A week later, he was joined at the Parker Jewish Institute by another QCC nursing student, Kristen Rodriguez, a classmate who had the same impulse to help.
He recalls an incident, soon after he started, with a patient who was in her final moments. Kern went to her bedside, raised the window shades to let in some sunlight, turned up the volume on the small radio she was using to listen to gospel music, adjusted her bed and held her hand. Mindful that patients sometimes let go when they are alone, he excused himself from the room. “I came back, no more than a minute later, and she was already gone,” he said. “It was important that I could comfort her in her final moments.”
The Sweet Sound of Applause
Shawna Townsend
The clapping serves as a pick-me-up for Shawna Townsend, a verbal stimulant and a powerful source of energy.
Townsend, who is pursuing a Ph.D in nursing at The Graduate Center, serves as a clinical nurse leader at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, helping to oversee the day-to-day care that nurses provide. When the pandemic deepened, she helped convert a hospital that specializes in orthopedic surgery to one that could treat patients with COVID-19, a transformation that included reconditioning operating rooms to ICU treatment units.
Every workplace has its rituals, and when a COVID patient recovers at HSS, the staffers form two rows, several feet apart, and shower the person with applause and motivational hand-made signs as they leave the facility. It can get emotional, as when a patient who had been intubated and nearly passed away suddenly recovered and was able to go home. That unforgettable “clap out” drew tears and a rendition of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” from the team. “That gives you hope,” Townsend said back in May.
It’s those moments that kept her going, through the darkest days when up to four of the hospital’s floors were filled with COVID-19 patients. She praised her professors for their support and lauded CUNY’s decision to provide a credit/no credit option to give students added flexibility with their studies. She’s since adjusted and says she relishes the “new normal:” By mid-May, the hospital was down to just one floor of infected patients and by June no longer had any patients with COVID-19.
When Life Gives you Lemons …
Luke Lombardi
It started with a text message between friends who felt a need to pitch in during the pandemic. Then, a phone call. Then, nightly Zoom sessions. Those nascent exchanges produced an organized nationwide grassroots effort that has raised $115,000 and counting for COVID-19 relief and drawn national media attention.
Smack in the middle of this big-hearted enterprise is Baruch sophomore Luke Lombardi, an assistant director of the Makin’ Lemonade Fund who heard about the fledgling enterprise from one of its co-founders, his childhood friend from Allendale, New Jersey, and became one of the first members to jump on board. The Makin’ Lemonade Fund is a virtual, online lemonade stand that raises money for three charities that are working to increase resources and preparedness in the battle against COVID-19: The CDC Foundation, Direct Relief and Feeding America. Contributions can be made through a GoFundMe page.
Lombardi, a catcher on Baruch’s baseball team, says the fund’s core group of about 30 college students and recent graduates has mushroomed to around 250 participants from 90 colleges. Before an appearance with WNBC-TV sports anchor Bruce Beck in early May, Lombardi told his public speaking professor at Baruch, Kenneth Urso, to tune in and evaluate his performance. “He said he was very moved by what we’re doing,” Lombardi said. “That was awesome to hear.”
Answering the Calls for Help
Anthony Almojera
Brooklyn College senior Anthony Almojera has always leaned on family and faith to get him through difficult times in his role as an Emergency Medical Services lieutenant-paramedic in the FDNY. But the daily flood of bad news generated by the coronavirus pandemic tested that resolve.
Almojera, who is also vice president of the EMS officers’ union, took the spring semester off to have surgery on a torn bicep tendon sustained while carrying a patient during a call. When the pandemic erupted in March, he put off the surgery to pitch in, working 16-hour shifts, nearly seven days a week at the apex and fielding some of the more than 7,000 calls per day requesting emergency medical service in the city.
As vice president of the union, Almojera, 43, also speaks with members about the toll the months-long experience has exacted on them. One of the lowest points for him occurred in late April when a 23-year-old EMT in the Bronx took his own life. Another medic revealed to him that he was also contemplating suicide but managed to fend off those impulses. Still, motivated by his desire to serve his fellow New Yorkers and help his union members, he soldiers on. The political science major anticipates finishing his bachelors at Brooklyn College sometime next year. “It’s tough, I’m not going to lie,” said Almojera, who oversees 50 EMTs and medics in EMS Station 40 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “But if we don’t respond to these calls, who will?”
Focusing on Finals and Providing PPE
Fenellah Kargbo
When the stress of studying for finals and the burden of distributing large shipments of personal protective equipment became too much, Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Fenellah Kargbo returned to thoughts of her husband and 13-month-old son.
Kargbo, who was born in Sierra Leone, aspires to apply to the BMCC nursing program. She’s also a member of the New York Army National Guard, and in March — midway through the spring semester — she was activated as part of New York State’s response to COVID-19. She’s been stationed at a regional distribution center for critical medical supplies in Albany.
There, PFC Kargbo has worked shifts loading and distributing large shipments of supplies, such as hand sanitizer, ventilators and PPE, to wherever there is demand in the region. After all of that, she went back to her hotel and summoned whatever energy she had left to confer with her professors, finish her coursework and prepare for her finals in four classes.
When it all became too much, she talked to her husband and watched FaceTime videos of her son dancing and playing from their home in Jersey City. “I try to balance everything as well as I can,” Kargbo, who joined the National Guard in 2015 and had not been activated until this moment, said in early May. “Fortunately, I have professors who are very understanding and supportive of what I’m doing.”
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving 500,000 students of all ages and awarding 55,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background.
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