Volunteering is more than just a photo op for OT grad

Sherridan Bigg has dedicated much of her academic career to helping others: From participating in service learning projects, providing free therapy to patients around Charleston to volunteering with One World Health, treating patients in rural Nicaragua to teaching women and girls in Haiti to sew reusable feminine hygiene kits.

It’s meaningful work she plans to continue when she graduates from MUSC this summer with a Master of Science in occupational therapy. "Without volunteer work, I honestly feel like a part of me is missing," she said. "I just feel a responsibility to do something more."

It was that feeling of responsibility that originally drew her to the health care field. From Aiken, South Carolina, Bigg majored in biology and minored in Spanish at Mars Hill University. It was there she had an experience that would shape her career path.

"In college, I worked at a summer camp for kids with chronic illnesses," she explained. "One of the other volunteers at the camp told me what occupational therapy was, and it seemed perfect. I really thrived at that camp, interacting with kids and pushing them to be their best while also having fun. I didn’t want to be a doctor and have to deal with blood, but occupational therapy seemed like the perfect alternative and the perfect combination of psychology and biology.”

Bigg chose to study OT at MUSC because of the university’s focus on service learning and community outreach, she said. “There is so much community, hands-on experience at MUSC. I really believe in service learning. It provides students the ability to practice and allows community members to receive free therapy to meet their needs.”

Bigg explained that the American Occupational Therapy Association only requires one course of level 1 fieldwork for accredited degree programs. Level 1 fieldwork consists of 40 hours spent working with disabled or chronically ill populations in day cares, schools, hospice centers, homeless shelters, community mental health centers or similar venues. MUSC requires not one but five such fieldwork experiences.

“It’s been a great opportunity to really get to know the Charleston community and some of the people that MUSC impacts on a personal level,” she said.

Bigg has gone above and beyond what’s required of her. In addition to the requisite fieldwork, she has traveled to Nicaragua with One World Health, a Charleston-based non profit organization dedicated to bringing sustainable health care to less developed countries. There, she put her Spanish language skills to use, often filling in for the team’s professional translators while volunteering as an occupational therapist at a mobile health clinic.

“We went out into rural communities in Nicaragua,” she said. “And we might see literally an entire community show up to the church or tent site — most of the clinics were held in churches. We were working with extremely limited resources, so we had to make or adapt a lot of our equipment and be really creative.”

She has also worked on the Days for Girls project that aims to bring sustainable feminine hygiene products and menstrual education to women and girls in Haiti.

Sherridan Bigg, along with Dr. Patti Coker-Bolt and the rest of her team in Haiti, taught women and girls to make their own reusable feminine hygiene kits. Sustainable projects like this are important because they tackle the root causes of gender disparities, Bigg said.

Patricia Coker-Bolt, Ph.D., associate professor in MUSC’s Division of Occupation Therapy, led the Days for Girls project in Haiti and has worked closely with Bigg while she’s studied at MUSC. “Sheridan is an incredibly caring and compassionate student with a passion for working with underserved populations,” Coker-Bolt said. “She was an essential member of our OT student team that worked on a Days for Girls project for young women in Haiti.”

Bigg described the project. “Feminine hygiene is really lacking in developing countries and it creates a huge barrier between women and men,” she said. “Imagine being on your period and not having any way to handle that, missing four to seven days every month. That’s almost two months a year, which puts them far behind male students. Many women drop out of school altogether after starting their period.”

She said the project not only helps women and girls overcome this disadvantage, but teaches them to be entrepreneurs, providing them the resources and skills to sell the hygiene kits they make.

“We didn’t teach how to sew. They were already awesome at that. But, we provided them with the resources and tools to create a business for themselves and also empower the women in their communities by providing these kits.”

Sustainability is important to Bigg. She doesn’t want the projects she works on to just be metaphorical Band-Aids and she doesn’t want to be a “volun-tourist,” as she calls people who show up for a photo op then leave. It’s the difference between giving someone a fish and teaching them to fish, as the saying goes.

“Creating a sustainable solution for a lot of these problems isn’t something you can do in a week,” she said. “We need to find the root causes of problems rather than looking for short-term fixes. Instead of just treating kidney disease, for example, we need to figure out the cause and address that: lack of clean water and proper nutrition.”

Bigg said her experiences overseas have given her a better understanding of her field of occupational therapy, which she says is traditionally a very Western form of medicine.

“The goal of occupational therapy is to promote independence,” she explained. “But in many other cultures, the family unit is much larger and more cohesive. If grandma or grandpa gets hurt, the family cares for them. Independence isn’t valued as much, so OT isn’t valued as much.”

Her experience has taught her to think about OT differently, to be more creative with approaches to treatment, and to incorporate whole families in the health care decision-making process. “You have to take into consideration the entire person,” she said. “You have to think about finances, family support, community support, community resources. You have to really think about the big picture when you’re treating patients, and think outside the box when those patients have limited resources, whether they’re in Nicaragua or the United States.”

Bigg thinks about families with limited resources a lot. In college, she organized a hunger week event to bring attention to how many families in her community were going without food.

“Our community in western North Carolina was third in the nation for hunger,” she said. “Fifty percent of the kids at the local elementary school were on some kind of food assistance program. There was a lot of need in that community.

“Hunger week started on a Monday and every day there was a different event. We held an Oxfam hunger banquet to simulate how different social classes eat. We held a community food drive and donated over 2,000 pounds of food to the local food bank. We held role play scenarios of what it’s like to be homeless, so they could understand people aren’t homeless just because they’re lazy — something happened in their life to bring them to that point. We encouraged people to sleep outside overnight, and by morning we only had a handful of people remaining.”

There’s no reason any community should feel the effects of hunger, Bigg said, and she feels drawn to do something about it. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that there is hunger in America. Everyone has the right to have their basic needs met. Why should I get to eat just because of the family I was born into?”

As she prepares to graduate, Bigg is finishing her last rotation at Medstar National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, D.C. The experience has been stressful but rewarding. She said she’s often called to use her knowledge of Spanish to translate for patients, which adds to the stress. “When I’m translating and also treating patients, that’s way too many parts of my brain working at the same time,” she said. “But I truly enjoy it. I’ve always had an affinity for speaking Spanish and working with Hispanic and Latino populations. It’s a joy. I feel very useful, because you can’t always use a telephone translation service when you’re helping a patient into the shower, for example.”

Bigg doesn’t know exactly where she’s headed once she graduates, but she knows it will include the kind of community service and volunteer work she’s grown to love. “I’d love to be working internationally, but I have no idea where I’ll be in six months. The only thing holding me back is the financial burden of school. But I really believe I was born with a gift to help people and that’s what I truly love to do. So, one way or another, I’ll find a way to make that happen.”

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Editor's Note: MUSC is celebrating its 2017 graduates. 

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