Making it Home
As Christmas peers out the window of her dorm room at a spectacular view of the East River and the FDR Drive, she does however seem a little overwhelmed, if not at New York’s tourist sites, then at her new surroundings. Her single room, for which she pays $350 a month (from a salary of $50,000), is cramped with a new queen-sized bed she bought to replace a dirty twin bed and a large 32-inch television set that she has yet to learn how to fully use. These new material objects, markers of a higher standard of living, look curiously untouched, her room unlived in. It is as if she’s bought a number of fancy new appliances but doesn’t bother to use them and most likely, doesn’t care to in the near future.
Her room is in fact a hodge-podge of American materialism and Philippine culture. For example, her Philippine junk food snacks–which she travels to Fisk Avenue, Queens, to buy–are scattered around the room. “Cornicks,” the Philippine version of Corn Nuts that come in flavors like “bawang” (garlic) and “adobo” (the peppered pork dish she frequently cooks in her dorm) are her personal favorites, as well as “Chiz Curls”–cheese puffs named after the Tagalog accent on the word cheese. Rosaries and crosses sit in prominent display on her desk. At the foot of her bed, a bootleg DVD of The Devil Wears Prada (bought from a street vendor in Chinatown three months ago) lies side by side with a deluxe boxed edition of Titanic. Neatly pressed cream-colored sheets are stiffly folded back, making the bed look more like a hotel or hospital bed then one that has been slept in the night before, let alone comfortably snuggled in. Except for the occasional pictures of family from home, her walls are bare and painted in the same mute, institutional green that is common to the entire dorm.
“I haven’t really had any time to decorate. I work all the time,” Christmas says. “But I kind of like it this way,” she quickly adds. “It’s calming.”
And a calming environment is understandably desired after what Christmas describes as long, frequently exhausting days at work. Christmas works in the isolation unit of Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem. There her world is a floor dedicated to patients whose diseases like pneumonia or HIV make them highly prone to infections. Patients are therefore unable to share rooms with other patients and are in frequent need of individual care. The floor consists of more than 30 patients with only two registered nurses on each shift to cover the entire floor (often only one is available). While this doesn’t seem particularly overwhelming at first, compared to the ratio mandated by law in California, where there must be one registered nurse for every five patients in the hospital, this is is indeed an extremely busy work environment.
“My goal is to ultimately move to California,” Christmas says earnestly. “I have extended family there and the nurses there are paid better. They also get treated better–here I feel so overworked. Everything is so fast-pace.”
