Alphabet Challenge: U

I’ve signed onto The Blogging from A to Z April Challenge 2021.

The challenge is to blog the whole alphabet in April and write at least 100 words on a topic that corresponds to the letter of the day. 

Every day, excluding Sundays, I’m blogging about Places I Have Been. The last post will be on Friday, April 30 when I finally focus on the letter Z. 

U: University of Illinois at Chicago

I graduated from UIC, College of Nursing in 1981 with a master’s degree in Public Health Nursing. During my first semester, in the community assessment class, I was assigned to the Pilsen neighborhood with a fellow student. At the end of this course, we had to write a paper about the community and the health problems that we unearthed. 

In order to get to know the neighborhood, my classmate and I walked the streets, looking at the housing and stopping in the stores. Mexican music played loudly from the shops while mothers, fathers, grandparents and lots of babies and children filled the sidewalks. I fell in love with the Mexican neighborhood. I brought home Piñatas, Mexican pastries and colorful vases. The vibrant sense of this Hispanic community impressed me.

There was another part of this geographical area: modest, detached homes and sidewalks swept clean by elderly Italian and Polish homeowners who soon would no longer be able to keep up their property. It was this population I would meet again in a few years after I became a gerontological nurse practitioner and took charge of a senior clinic on the westside of Chicago. UIC was the conduit for the welcome change of direction in my career.