Pen pals help ease isolation during COVID pandemic
Zach Cruze is getting the postcards ready to go out today.
Yes, postcards.
Those things your grandparents and great-grandparents would take a pen to, whenever they were on vacation.
Or, if they simply wanted to jot something to stay connected to family and friends as they worked through their day-to-day.
Postcards used to be a big deal.
Cruze wants to make them that way again.
He’s a Morgantown councilor who represents the city’s 3rd Ward, but that’s not the job that sustains him, financially.
During his day-to-day, he serves as executive director of Empty Bowls Monongalia County, the outreach organization that combats food insecurity across the region.
Food insecurity, by its sociological definition, is the state of simply not having the means to take in enough food to sustain one’s self, nutritionally.
It’s everywhere in West Virginia, including relatively prosperous Mon County, and it’s even more pronounced in the present with COVID-19 upon the land.
The coronavirus, Cruze said, has also spawned another kind of malnourishment: The emotional kind.
Alone, and unanchored
And it’s the nation’s elderly who have been particularly bruised by it, Cruze said.
Those residing in nursing facilities have been isolated from loved ones during the COVID-calamity — which, as health-watchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations say, can be just as deadly as the virus itself.
Powerful loneliness among the elderly brings a 50% increased risk of developing dementia, those watchers say.
And a risk of more than 30% that they’ll suffer a stroke, according to other studies.
Before the outbreak, Cruze had secured grants through the Volunteer West Virginia, the state’s community service organization and Arts Mon, a local nurturer of creative endeavor in Morgantown.
He was going to use the offerings to arrange get-togethers with senior citizens and young people as a way to foster intergenerational friendships — “But then, COVID hit,” he said.
“We couldn’t go into the nursing facilities,” he said.
“So I had to come up with something else.”
Maybe something better, even, considering the generation.
Get it in writing
Nursing facilities, he said, are populated by residents who grew up writing letters (in cursive), sending postcards and crafting thank-you notes for every occasion.
In today’s cluttered, hyper-communication age of email, Twitter and Instagram, he decided he’d slow it down — and launch a pandemic pen-pal club, of sorts.
Who’s in the club? Various people from the community, plus the residents of Sundale, The Madison and Harmony at Morgantown facilities.
“It’s a pen-pal match, actually,” he said.
“We want to connect people with shared interests.”
And, it’s already working, Cruze said.
One volunteer from the community expressed an interest in Big Band music in the initial overture.
Another resident in one of the facilities responded by saying he was a huge fan of Glenn Miller and the Dorsey brothers during his younger days.
“Those two are really gonna get along,” Cruze said.
The groups will exchange one or two postcards a week for the next month, the Empty Bowls director said.
That will knock the isolation of the coronavirus, he said, while, hopefully, fostering longer, more lasting, pen-pal communication.
“Lasting,” is the word, other experts in that arena say.
Hand-written is from the heart, they said.
It isn’t something hastily clacked-out on a keyboard — or “thumbed-out” on your phone at the traffic light.
With pen in hand, those experts say, one will likely be more “personal,” and certainly more measured.
More thought, more care, they say.
A bowl full of art
After the postcard exchange, the residents will go to work for Empty Bowls, Cruze said.
Residents will paint a grouping of bowls that give Empty Bowls Monongalia and its famous annual luncheon its name.
Cruze’s organization partners with the WOW! Factory in Star City for the cause.
The bowls that come out there are plain white.
Volunteers dig in with paint brushes.
Swirls and other artistic renderings adorn every bowl filled with soup for the cause, making each one a truly unique vessel of art.
You even get to take the bowl home with you at the end, as a reminder of the Empty Bowls mission.
Cruze said the finished bowls from the nursing facilities will be photographed and posted in a virtual art gallery.
It will be a juried event, he said, with the community serving as judges.
The executive director, though, is especially excited about the pen-pal exchange.
He began his professional life as an archeologist and now enjoys digging into the social strata of interpersonal communication.
Unearthing a heart, and brushing the dirt of time away, he said, will always yield one undisputed find: That people, are, well, people.
“Really, the only thing that changes over the years and generations are the pop culture references,” he said.
“We’re all still the same.”
You might want to write that down, he said.
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