For her submission to the 2024 DukeEngage Reflection Challenge, Isha Omer T’27 created a concrete poem about her experience in DukeEngage Durham, with the explanatory note below.
This summer, I spent half of my time volunteering with the Volunteer Medical Corps, an organization that provided sports physicals to schools all over Durham. A lot of these students did not have medical insurance and would not have been able to participate in sports otherwise. Thus, when I was helping out with the sports physicals, sometimes a student would share how much this meant to them and how they wouldn’t have been able to play sports if it wasn’t for the VMC. This really touched me and also connected to some of my prior experiences of growing up in a very small town where lots of people do not have access to healthcare.
The poem takes the format of the phases of the moon (as the theme is change, and what is always changing but the moon?). The poem goes over how I changed and how I realized I am capable of change through DukeEngage; it also touches on how your impact doesn’t have to be some huge, global thing — you don’t have to bring world peace or solve world hunger. Helping your community, even if it’s just one person, is still incredibly valuable, and we are all capable of such positive change!
Isha Omer is a Duke student studying Neuroscience and Spanish. She is a Trinity Scholar, a scholarship program for students from the Carolinas who excel academically and are engaged community leaders.