January 10, 2009
Student volunteer inspires all around her to serve others
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
From left, Notre Dame student Marissa Albidress and an unnamed volunteer offer refreshment and good cheer to Air Force Captain Darrell Lee, a registered nurse at one of the intensive care units at David Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield. Photo courtesy of Charles Albidress III
Marissa Albidress, an eighth grade student at Notre Dame School in Vacaville, has been living this year’s Catholic Schools Week theme, “Celebrate Service,” since she was a kindergartner.
Last year, Albidress was awarded the 2007 Presidential Volunteer Service Gold Award, the highest federal honor given to volunteers under 18, for having logged more than 100 hours of service to her community. Albidress will receive the Gold Award again this year, having surpassed the 100-hour mark in early December. She’s still volunteering.
Albidress’s father, Charles Albidress, recalls that his daughter “has wanted to help the poor” since she was five years old.
“She’d see poor people asking for help in the parking lot at the grocery store and she’d want to give them something to eat,” he said. So the Albidress family shared their groceries. These days, Marissa Albidress routinely buys an additional burger at a fast food restaurant to give if she sees someone asking for help in the restaurant parking lot.
As Albidress grew, her circle of service expanded. Throughout her years at Notre Dame School, she has participated in school service projects such as canned food drives.
Then in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, she began volunteering outside of her school at David Grant Medical Center, the hospital where her father works in the organizational planning office at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield.
She volunteered in the mornings, two to three days a week that summer. She helped out in the medical retirees’ office, typing letters in Word software, updating computer files, making copies and answering the phone.
But she worked mainly with the hospital chapel ministry, taking a hospitality cart filled with pastries, breads and coffee around to hospital departments such as the intensive care unit, the emergency room, labor and delivery, the medical and surgical patient floors, the laboratory and radiology clinics, and the unit where the injured military personnel first returning from Iraq and Afghanistan wait to be sent on to other military hospitals.
Albidress found that she loved the work.
“Marissa is our motivator,” said Eva Galeai, volunteer coordinator for the chapel ministry. “She has so much energy and enthusiasm that she inspires us all.”
In the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Albidress added a night shift to her work. Each week, when donated baked goods arrive from Panera Bread bakery in Vacaville, Albidress helps wrap the bread and pastries and stocks the hospitality cart. Then she takes the cart around to night shift workers and patients’ family members. Her shift runs from 9 p.m. until midnight.
“She drags her father here at night, after he’s worked all day,” Galeai said. “He has to drive her here. She’s not old enough to drive herself. She calls it her time with her father. She loves it. I see her pushing that cart and I wish I could have some of her energy.”
In the fall of 2007, Albidress took some of that energy back to Notre Dame School. She had heard of a project, headed up by Air Force Major Trish Vorachek, to send clothing to children in the war zone of Afghanistan. Voracheck, a registered dietician and the nutritional medical flight commander, had been deployed to Afghanistan and had seen firsthand the conditions the children endured.
“I was in Bagram, at the Craig Joint Theater Hospital, from January to May of ’06,” Vorachek said. “We treated coalition forces and humanitarian cases, especially women and children.”
“I had a nine-month-old baby who was just learning to walk when I was deployed,” she said, “and in Afghanistan I saw babies who were also learning to walk in January and February, but in the snow, with no shoes.” Vorachek organized the clothing drive at Travis Air Force Base for those children.
Albidress suggested the Travis clothing drive to the principal of Notre Dame School, Lee Yurkovic, who enthusiastically supported the effort. Albidress and several other Notre Dame students set up a large box for donations in the school office, and sent out a flyer announcing the drive.
For two weeks they emptied the overflowing box three times a week, with Charles Albidress driving the donations back to his house. Then in Albidress’s garage, the students sorted the clothes and shoes into 59 boxes weighing more than 1,000 pounds.
Charles Albidress drove the students and the clothing boxes to Travis to be shipped to Afghanistan along with the other 8,000 pounds of clothing, shoes, and blankets the drive collected for the Afghan people. The Notre Dame students joined a “bucket brigade” of volunteers measuring and weighing the boxed donations for shipment.
Albidress said she imagines the kids on the other end receiving the boxes she and her friends sent. She thinks they’ll not only be warmer, they’ll know that other people care about them.
“That’s how I would feel if I were in Afghanistan,” she said.
Albidress continues to volunteer at the hospital, but she doesn’t volunteer at night during the school year because of scheduling conflicts.
The bread truck delivers at 9 p.m. on Wednesday nights, she said, but she has drama class on Wednesdays from 3 to 5 p.m., then soccer from 6 to 8 p.m.
“There was no time to do homework,” she explained. She tried to get her homework done before school on Thursday mornings, but that didn’t work out. So she waits for school breaks to pick up any night shifts.
“I can’t wait for her school breaks,” said Galeai of the hospital chapel ministry. “Her energy motivates everyone around her.”
