community service – Memphis Flyer

Since its inception in 1991, John McCall’s ArkWings Foundation has taken more than 600 local inner-city youth on weeklong trips to the American Southwest in an attempt to nourish their bodies, minds, and spirits. McCall, an associate professor with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, has the teenagers spend part of their time climbing, rappeling, hiking, and canoeing and another part distributing medical supplies at a Native American pueblo. Once back in Memphis, the community service continues. — By Zac Hill

Flyer: Taking kids on camping trips to New Mexico isn’t most people’s idea of medical care.

McCall: Medicine is an integrated process. A lot of medical schools around the country — Harvard, Duke, Stanford — have mind-body institutes. It’s about reconnecting medical schools to teach more than just the allopathic aspects of medicine.

For so long, we didn’t know how to measure that stuff, so the emotional and spiritual aspects of health got carved up and locked out. Really, we’re trying to help people answer life’s three questions: Where did we come from, what are we doing here, and where are we going? … People are hard-wired to ask these things.

What happens on the mission trips?

Taking care of yourself to take care of others is a fundamental principle. We take the kids out to work with some of the Native American groups in New Mexico, and we distribute health-and-wellness kits as part of a Fourth of July parade. We do all kinds of outdoor activities, but the kids constantly say their favorite part is the parade. “For the first time,” one of them said to me, “somebody wanted something that we had — and we had something to give to them.”

That’s our “transformational experience”: getting these kids outside of their everyday environment, breaking the cycle and planting the ideas that there is something else in the world besides what they’re used to. Most of these guys have never been out of Memphis.

What happens when you get back to Memphis?

When we come back to the real world, we see the kids once a week, do service projects, and talk. We collect medical equipment from hospitals and doctors’ offices. The kids help pick this stuff up and take it to a warehouse where we transfer it out. We give the equipment to medical mission teams that are going overseas.

Well, I guess you sort of have to hand it to Naomi Campbell. She is making even me resign myself to the fact that the age of celebrity and fleeting fame and the public obsession with anything and everything truly meaningless is inescapable. So she goes to court after hurling a crystal-encrusted cell phone at her maid and hitting her in the head with it, causing the maid to require stitches. Campbell gets sentenced to community service cleaning floors and toilets at a sanitation department in New York. The poor little thing. With all that raw talent and human kindness with which she is so filled, you wouldn’t think she would be so violent. But hey, she was, after all, missing a pair of designer jeans and it was, after all, the maid’s job to keep up with them. So she does her service and shows up on time every day to scrub the toilets and even spends her lunch hour eating pizza with the little people who work there to actually support their families. But she’s no dummy. Little did they know she was “modeling” to and from the job every day, wearing designer gowns and sunglasses from her Rolls Royce to the doors of the sanitation department, all the while being photographed by W magazine for a spread in the July issue. She was reportedly getting paid her day-rate for the gig — $60,000 a day. A tad bit more than the three or four hundred dollars she was so unfairly forced to give the maid. On her final day, she strolled from the sanitation department to her Rolls in a floor-length, silver sequined Dolce & Gabbana gown that was quite stunning. It made headlines! She was once again the toast of the town! Google news had her story even above the announcement that Anna Nicole Smith’s autopsy results were going to be released. But fame and the spotlight are indeed fleeting, and now there is a countdown on Google about the autopsy results. I just noticed a few minutes ago a headline that read: “Anna Nicole Cause of Death Two Hours Away.” I guess by now it’s only one hour away, and by the time this paper is printed the results will be three days old. Old news, for sure. Underneath the Anna Nicole Cause of Death headline, under “More Top Stories,” was a report about five U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Cause of death unknown. Unless it was “friendly fire,” and then that might take years to conclude if we have to depend on anyone of high rank who might know. You can bet they were not making $60,000 a day — or for their entire tour of duty, for that matter. Maybe it would have been better if the judge in the Naomi Campbell trial had sentenced her to cleaning things up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She could have scrubbed up some of the filth that was causing wounded soldiers to suffer from infections. She could have shooed away some rats. And all the while, she could have been modeling the latest designs from the hottest designers of the moment and could have raked in her usual fortune. Or she could have gotten mad and thrown another little tantrum and hurled a phone and accidentally hit a guy who’d just had his leg blown off. So maybe it wouldn’t have been such a good idea. At any rate, it might have brought a little more attention to the conditions there. Maybe they should have done Anna Nicole’s autopsy there. At least she was already dead and not in a life-threatening situation because of the filth and stench impeding her recovery. See, it would all tie in together so well and get so much publicity for the hospital, which was obviously way, way under the radar. But I guess that’s because it was ugly news that didn’t involve a top supermodel or a former topless dancer who married a billionaire and got her own reality television show. Well, those autopsy results ought to be in, so I guess I had better go relieve this unrelenting pain of not knowing why Anna Nicole died. Now, if July would just hurry up and get here so we can all see that spread on the cell-phone-throwing star. I can’t wait to see who she’s wearing.