The Other Ojai

Working at Help of Ojai I have a skewed perspective of who I think makes up Ojai.  I have had multiple opportunities this past week to enjoy the other parts of Ojai and here are a few stories from those days.

In a small town you always have some sort of festival that takes place.  Ojai's festival is called Ojai Day and people go around the week before wishing others a “Happy Ojai Day”.  The night before Ojai Day the main street is closed to paint a mandala on the street.  Different artists come up with designs for the sections.  Ryan and I helped paint sections of red and white.  It was a zoo and some of the artists were very particular about each color and how you painted.  Luckily I was just told to fill in the pre-drawn circles.  I'm glad my three years of art in high school came in handy.  On Ojai Day shops set up booths to sell merchandise, there are performances at stages, food venues and different organizations set up informational tables.  Of course Help of Ojai has a table every year.  The most popular question during my shift was, "Oh, Help of Ojai!  Can you be helpful and point me in the direction of the Raptor Center?”  The crowd in attendance is mostly moms with children, hipsters and dogs.  It's everything that you are imagining right now.  During the entire day, we had the belly dancers performing behind us.  I never knew that one dance(?) studio could have a 6 hour long performance.  The music ranged from bohemian to rap to an Irish jig.  At another stage, mimes acted out the Passion of the Christ with rock music. My favorite booth was one with printed t-shirts had phrases like Coffee O'clock and Half Mermaid.

Next, I had the pleasure of attending the Best of Ojai Reception.  Year round people vote for the “Best of” categories in Ojai through the newspaper.  All of the winners come together and are recognized during the reception.  Each winner donates to the event to make it a fun evening.  If you are a restaurant winner you donate food or drink and if you are in another category you donate something from your business.  I won a free haircut from a local salon and our executive director won a pair of free sunglasses from a local optometrist.  You would think this would be a formal event for networking purposes. It was really jeans casual because everyone already knows everyone.  It was a delightful evening and I enjoyed being informed on the town's gossip.

Lastly, there was the Help of Ojai's Pumpkin Social.  I would equate the Pumpkin Social to a church festival.  Everyone at Help of Ojai puts in a lot of time and effort to make sure it runs smoothly.  First, I got to help bake the first half of the 198 pumpkin pies that we sell at the social.  It was a lot of fun working with people at other Help of Ojai’s sites and seeing how our senior nutrition program is run while we used their kitchen.  Next, we spent Friday afternoon setting up and decorating.  This consisted of Halloween and fall decorations coming out of multiple boxes and being tossed onto trees and tied onto poles.  We all came in the next day to finish setting up and run the event.  There were a lot of seniors with great lipstick color choices, which reminded me fondly of Honey.  There were also a lot of people with what looked like hoarding problems as they bought 6 almost dead plants.  Even if you put them in the ground, we are still in a drought!  The best part of the day was a toss-up between the live music and the pumpkin pie.  The music was good enough to be played at the International Bluegrass Festival.  It's a small band that picks up a few people for this event every year and you would never know they don't play together full time.

So here is the other Ojai and a cheer to this small town.

How Was I Supposed to Know?

Three weeks of frustration came to a resounding end when a client finally (FINALLY!) figured out the last issue with her medical insurance.  After coming in multiple times a week with new information, spending countless times on hold, leaving numerous messages with different agencies, we finally figured out what the last holdup was.

It was truly a team effort of the client, the pro (Karen) and the rookie (me).  She is one of my first clients that I did a complete intake on and had her continually meet with me.  I have felt so bad for this woman as she is constantly telling me the story as I'm taking notes and then looking at Karen with my deer in a head light expression.  What do I do next?  Who do I call next?  What information do I need now?  The biggest question we still haven't figured out is how do we put our phones on speakerphone?

So what exactly was the hold up in this?  First, we had to change the client's medi-CAL insurance to Ventura County.  This process started before she left her previous county and was still not completed by the time she moved and needed to see a doctor and get prescriptions for  very serious medical problems.  Finally, a very nice man at the medi-CAL office told us about the Omnibus Office that can enroll in the plan over the phone and grant emergency medical access.  If this client hadn't come to us, would she ever have found out about this office?  Maybe.  How did it take us so long to find about this office? We didn't talk to the right people.  How do you know who the right person to talk to is?  I have no clue.

First hurdle was cleared, but second hurdle came when medications could not be picked up due to no prescription coverage.   What?  I thought we figured all of the insurance out when we called the Omnibus Office!  Well medi-CAL and Medicare don't communicate.  As Karen is talking to her girls in public health and the client am I are on the phone with a very nice medi-CAL worker we have the light bulb go off that it's a plan that ended on September 30th.  We're talking to the wrong agency and we need to call Medicare.  The irritated Medicare worker and I get cut off due to lack of speakerphone skills.  We try again and the Medicare worker explains that yes that plan ends, yes she is enrolled in a new plan to start December 1st and yes we have enrolled her in a new plan until that one starts.  Excellent! She should've been notified by letter, but no letter was received at the current address.  Medicare takes so long to process changes of address, the letter was most likely sent to the previous address even after a month's notice of change.

So now we have a happy client that has medical coverage and insurance coverage, but she looked at me afterwards and simply asked, "How was I supposed to know?".  We have no answer for that.

A Lesson (or Rambling) In Giving Back

Last week I had the pleasure of going down to Help of Ojai's West Campus and help put together our monthly food boxes because the staff was not sure they would have enough volunteers to be efficient.  Enough volunteers showed up and I was looking forward to meeting new people, but to my surprise most of the volunteers are clients that we help.  This is not the first time I've seen a client or former client giving back whatever they can to Help of Ojai.  We have one man that does his laundry every week and while it's washing he takes out our trash and tidies up the office.  I hope this doesn't get preachy, but this giving back means so much more to me then people who just want to write a check (which is kind of ironic as I'm writing letters this week asking for money).  Donating money is great, always appreciated and I 100% understand the need for monetary donations. The service that these clients are doing means more to me though because I see their struggles on paper and what they're telling me.  It's the effort they take to care enough about others to prepare food boxes, even though they are struggling. Or to not be able to give anything because you have nothing, but looking around the office and seeing a need and quietly doing it.

These deeds are what I am trying to aim for during this year.  Whether it's participating in a community member's project or a part of my own service project, I want to be able to do it in a manner that is humble and true.  Yes, I get frustrated all the time. Yes, I have no problem using my swim coach voice to tell a certain client we are not talking about religion. Yes, I have a different certain client that I always make a sarcastic remark to about the no politics at my desk rule.  But to all of those types of "yes", there is the small victory yes.  The proud smile I give when the client takes a few deep breaths to calm herself down when medi-Cal is not understanding her problem (for the fourth day in a row).  The thank you to the neighbor that acts as a liaison to her elderly neighbor just because.  The certain client that credits Karen for him still being alive (which I whole heartily agree with!).  And the other certain client that shoots a sarcastic remark right back at me and says just give me Donald Trump's address.  Those are the moments that I hope to fill my journals up with.

The whole giving money to an organization was also brought up in a conversation I had with someone about the Adopt A Family project I am working on.  The program works by a person/group/family saying they want to adopt a family in need and buy presents for the children and donate a box of food.  In this conversation I was too busy be frustrated and distracted to listen and understand what the problem was.  They wanted to be selective in who they donated to (the children only) and wanted to give the children the presents or donate money that would be guaranteed to buy presents for children only.  After three days of frustration I realized it was the principle that I think is being reinforced in this situation and not that someone wanted to donate the money.  I would gladly take donations and shop and wrap presents for all of these families.  It would be awesome! The reinforcement that could have been there was we get to handpick who we want to help.  The possible reinforcement of we can write a check and send someone else to do the work so we don't have to see the full scope of what poverty looks like in a family.  Maybe the reinforcement that as long as I donate money, I don't have to directly think about a problem and how it can impact a person.  Even if this wasn't the message that was meant, it was the one conveyed.  It frustrates me that there could be so many teachable moments in this project for everyone in the community and we won't be able to try.

In other news, I had my first surf lesson and it was incredible.  I rode the board in twice and wiped out a lot.  I hope I get to go again so I can try to figure out how to stand up on the board.  From my research, I need to work on my core strength and balance.  This might be my metaphor for life right now: strength and balance.  Or maybe that’s just my hippy way of thinking that it's all connected.