Elisabeth Barahona

Maple City Health Care Center has an awesome vision and mission. It’s been wonderful to be a part of it.

I’ve been with Maple City Health Care since 2015. James Gingerich is the founding physician and visionary for it. It’s been in the community for 25-plus years. Maple City Health Care has always been committed to providing access to health care in an integrated way. So we have nutritionists and obviously all the medical personnel – nurse practitioners and doctors and then behavioral health – to create access to overall, holistic health care.

There are different degrees of anxiety. Some people are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, but I think it’s safe to say that everybody – even if we’re managing it well – is touched with anxiety right now because we have such a lack of control of what’s going on. And it impacts every aspect of our lives.

Fortunately, our field prepares us to take care of ourselves and understand how to manage holding space for other people while being able to attend to our own needs. We are the instrument for our job, so if we’re not taking care of ourselves, we can’t be helpful. We can’t hold space for other people’s healing. So I’ve continued the practices that I did before COVID. I have spiritual practices, I have physical practices that I do and commitments to those. I’ve added in other kinds of practices that attend to my well-being, too.

I think there’s a beauty in the connections that are possible in a small town. The amount of connections that are possible creates a sense of belonging, and I think inspires investment in a community. For us, that’s been true – being able to intimately know who runs your kids’ classrooms and who your doctors are. It creates belonging, but it then inspires a sense of commitment to making the community go round. When you’re in a big city and you don’t know the web of people in your community, there’s a lot less commitment to the place you live.