Building Some Sweat Equity in Community

This Saturday morning started for Dr. Marty Gilbert with him flipping pancakes for 600 people gathered at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center, where he is the medical director and chief of staff.

After helping feed the large crowd of other doctors, nurses, hospital staff and even their families, Gilbert headed into the hospital parking lot to help lead a session in painting ceramics for handicapped children.

One of the children he guided in her painting was a 7-year-old girl born with no legs, the victim of a drug-addicted mother and now in foster care.

On this bright sunny day, Gilbert was not the only Kaiser Bellflower staffer here to do good deeds. The breakfast kicked off a much-anticipated day for the Kaiser Bellflower staff: their annual Hearts at Work day of volunteerism.

By the end of the day, the hundreds of volunteers who enjoyed Gilbert’s pancakes would scatter throughout southeast Los Angeles County to paint houses, repair kitchens, build a playground and a garden--for the needy, the elderly, a church and a public school.

Days of volunteerism are a popular tool among institutions, such as churches, synagogues, businesses and nonprofit groups, which once a year venture out into the community to do their share in improving the quality of life.

At Kaiser, the children’s ceramics session was just one of 11 community service projects the hospital staff carried out during this, the sixth year of the event.

Community service has a strong influence on the Kaiser Bellflower family of doctors and staff, Gilbert said. The elaborate Hearts at Work day grew out of smaller community service projects the staff used to perform.

“We have 400 physicians. Most of us live in communities outside of this area, but we spend 40 to 50 hours in the community,” said Gilbert, who lives in the hills above Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. “Most of us like to give back to the communities in which we work.”

After the breakfast, about half of the crowd went on a 2-kilometer walk to raise funds for “999 for Kids,” a support program for children with physical and mental problems. It is sponsored by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. During the breakfast, the hospital already had presented the group with a $5,000 check.

The rest of the volunteers got in van shuttles to their assigned projects in communities such as Huntington Park, Norwalk, Bellflower and Bell. One shuttle arrived just before 9 a.m. at Olympia Orozco’s modest home in Huntington Park.

The hospital works with community contacts, such as social workers or social service agencies, to get referrals for projects.

The coordinator of the parent center at Huntington Park High School, which Orozco’s twin 17-year-old daughters attend, had visited Orozco before and seen the falling sink in her kitchen and the holes in the cabinets.

Orozco, 52, and her husband, Luis, 65, bought the house in 1980 and had never made a repair. She made little in sewing and he was recently laid off from his job at a factory that makes car rims.

The parent center coordinator asked the hospital to consider the Orozcos’ home as a Hearts at Work project, which is how on this day 15 volunteers descended on it.

“I don’t get tired of thanking God,” Orozco said as the swarm went to work.

Inside her kitchen, Don Buma--who works in Kaiser’s facilities department--got to work on the cabinets and sink. Carole Jurado, a physician scheduler, painted the walls around Buma while nurses Candice Rogers and Linda Wolff rolled a new coat of white paint on the dining room walls.

Many staff at the hospital look forward to the yearly Hearts at Work day.

For Cathy Buddemeyer of Downey, administrator of the internal medicine and family practice at Kaiser’s Imperial medical offices, it’s one of those important events that mark the time of year for her family: Easter, Mother’s Day, Hearts at Work.

Each year, in fact, she brings her two sons to help out. Sean, 15, and Corey, 13, painted the house’s exterior walls a light green alongside their mother.

“We went into medicine because we like to help people,” Cathy Buddemeyer said. “This is a very concrete way to make a difference in somebody’s life.”

Miles away, another crew arrived at Sam and Agnes Latino’s home in Bellflower to landscape and paint their home’s exterior.

Agnes, 73, has been in a wheelchair for years. She’s diabetic, suffered a stroke and endured heart surgery.

Sam, who at 79 is too frail to withstand the hip replacement that he needs, hobbles around the house not much faster than Agnes can get around.

The volunteers came to their rescue partly because Agnes is well-known at Kaiser, where she volunteers feeding data into computers.

“She’s the greatest of volunteers,” Sam said proudly of his wife.

“Anything I can do in a wheelchair,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh.

Recently she got a plaque from the hospital for her volunteer work. Volunteering is not new for Agnes, who as far back as the 1950s went door-to-door collecting money for the March of Dimes and its work to fight polio.

Now she’s the beneficiary of others’ good will.

“It’s more than painting the house,” Agnes Latino said. “It brings up your spirits.”

Hearts at Work’s other projects this day included building a playground at the Good Day preschool run by the Huntington Park Community Church and a science garden at Dolores Huerta Elementary School in Norwalk.

And this year, like every year, Hearts at Work offered the hospital staff a chance to take its mission of helping people beyond the hospital’s walls.

“It’s a root of why most of us went into medicine,” said Gilbert, the hospital’s administrator. “We have a tool, we have skills, we have means and we like to use those to better the community and the people that live in the community.”