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A few days ago I drove out to a small town in a rural community in Colorado when I am the Obama community organizer. That morning, I met with a Mormon woman in her mid sixties. She lives in a humble home, next to her red barn in the middle of a corn field. She has a big “proud to be a Democrat” sticker by the door to “warn them when they knock.” I sat down at her kitchen table and while sipping apple juice in a plastic cup I shared with her why I decided to put off starting my job and, and with my wife’s blessing, left her in LA for the summer to go to where the Obama campaign needed me. I explained that I am tired of being unable, as a physician, to address the underlying causes of most of the health care problems of my patients: poor urban design with limited access to parks, impoverished neighborhood with little access to fresh produce, schools where the government stresses test scores and not relationships between students and adults (where are the mentoring programs?).  And why are there kids in this wealthy country without insurance? These are political and policy issues I can’t change while working in my clinic; they didn’t give us the answer to these questions in med school.

                And then I listened to her life story. Her parents were Roosevelt Democrats. She was instilled with the notion of the importance of community. Her husband, now in his 70s, had been a farmer. She was a house wife and raised 3 children who all then moved away to big cities (Denver and Sante Fe). She invested all of their retirement savings in what she thought where low risk mutual funds. In the early part of this century, she lost their life savings in the downfall of Enron. Over a 9 month period, their mutual funds hemorrhaged to nothing. Her husband and she faced the reality of no retirement to live off of and at 68, he returned to work, on a farm working as a laborer. They now live off of little money and hope they do not get sick. They have no income to upkeep their home and none to move and start over. They can’t sell the home because no one is moving into this rural poor community.  All this is why, she explained, she is going to help change the direction of our country. She agreed to have a group of her friends over to her house, next weekend, and we will all discuss establishing an infrastructure to run local voter registration drives. This was my first meeting with a community member as an Obama Organizing Fellow.

-Alex