Providing Emotional Support to Children with Cancer

Over the last two months I worked at Casa de la Amistad, in Mexico City, to provide emotional support alongside their team of psychologists to young children and adolescents with an oncological condition from under-resourced regions of Mexico, to alleviate the emotional strain of their lived experiences. The time I spent with this organization was an absolutely invaluable experience in my Whitman college experience, as a Psychology major and aspiring Hispanic Studies and Art minor. Working with a team of psychologists in Spanish, who all shared different educational backgrounds in the field, gave me an extensive look into different ways to continue onwards with the knowledge that my own background in psychology is providing me. This internship gave me a look into the different ways one can engage with psychology in a professional work environment, and opened my eyes to more niche areas of psychology which I may want to pursue. I left this experiene with a burning passion for the world of psychology which deals with the emotional support of medically ill individuals, especially youth.

Each day at Casa de la Amistad we would start with a “recorrido,” during which I, along with one other psychologist, would knock and check in on all of the rooms where the youth stay, to see how they slept, how they were feeling (emotionally and physically), when they had their next hospital visit/treatment/surgery/etc. I spent every morning as an assistant teacher for the youth who weren’t in the hospital in treatment that given morning, which gave me a profound look into the practices used within educational psychology.

There, we used unique teaching methods to support the youth in reaching their learning targets which oftentimes meant learning how to read, write, and performing certain mathematical equations, etc, while covering other important material relevant to their age group. In the afternoons, I would serve as a psychologist representing the team of “apoyo emocional” (emotional support) during artistic workshops, such as painting, body movement classes, and music therapy sessions, to keep an eye on behavioral/emotional needs, as a way of keeping track of changes over time across all activities and programs in each individual child/adolescent. I would then share all of my observations along with the rest of the psychologists, at our weekly meetings. I also led bibliotherapy lessons for the children and adolescents, took intervention notes in Spanish in their online data tracking system for their cases, helped to design and facilitate individual and group activities for the youth in the organization, and created a presentation with background information on childhood cancer in Mexico for my supervisor to present to the kids of staff at Casa de la Amistad at a later event date in the summer, with the goal of educating them on the work that their parents engage in.

To have been able to work in such a large, well established non-profit dedicated to such immensely vital work, side by side such passionate, talented and well-educated psychologists has taught me more than I could ever put onto paper. For the last few years, I’ve known that one day I want to use my Spanish in future work environments (in the realm of psychology/social work), either in a Spanish speaking country, or in the US. As such, being given the chance to work in Mexico City for Casa de la Amistad, in a fully Spanish work environment, was an inexplicably large opportunity for me.

Aside from gaining an immense amount of professional work experience and insight into different ways to approach psychological interventions, this internship provided me with powerful opportunities for self reflection into my desire to work in similarly emotionally intense work environments, and whether this kind of work is for me. Having to confront the very real possibility that some of the youth I was working with (~10 months old-21 years old), who were having an especially hard time battling their sickness may not live to see the next week or month, or year, was a daily and normalized part of working in my position. I wasn’t expecting to talk so openly and at such lengths about death, the desire to give up hope, and to thus die, especially not with such young kids. Although working at Casa de la Amistad for two months can by no means be held side by side to the experience of working as a psychologist/social worker as a long term career (when considering the likelihood of emotional burnout), I am grateful that this experience at least gave me a realistic snapshot into what individuals working in related fields may go through, on a day to day basis. As such, this summer internship was priceless.