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Acts of kindness and compassion

Their giving spirit extends near and far

It's become our holiday tradition at UCLA Today to recognize and commend faculty and staff members who give selflessly of their talents and time to help the less fortunate in their communities. This year's Bruin Angels, selected from departments across the campus, have reached out to those near and far, from East Los Angeles to a town in Armenia. As our thoughts this season turn to giving, we honor them.

Photos by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services

BARBARA BROWNING

While managing the oncology and AIDS unit at then-Santa Monica Hospital in the late ’70s, nurse Barbara Browning noticed that while patients were being discharged with all their clinical needs met, their families were struggling to provide some basic services, such as transportation to the doctor or radiation treatments.

Browning decided to do something about it. Teaming up with the Rev. Robert S. Richards, then her pastor at Lutheran Church of the Master in West Los Angeles, she started the nonprofit, nonsectarian organization Hospice in Home for terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients. Working together, the pair recruited volunteers, including retired physicians and nurses, to run errands, look after pets, give caregivers a break and, in general, provide comfort, support and friendship.

“We [found] people who were interested in helping people,” said Browning, who is now associate director for organizational performance improvement at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. “We had a volunteer who once was a beautician. [She] would go out and do their hair and just make them feel better.”

Now, with many hospice programs supplying their own volunteers, Hospice in Home has evolved into primarily a resource center, offering information, a sympathetic ear and medical equipment like wheelchairs and walkers.

“I still feel we’re providing an important service,” said Browning, who continues to work with Richards on helping families organize critical services patients need when they go home. “They can call us and we can give them a plan,” said Browning. “If they reach an impasse, they can call us back and say, ‘Now what do I do?’ ”

The service must be working. “We get a lot of appreciation calls,” she said.

— By Sandy Siegel

EILEEN FLAXMAN

Eileen Flaxman remembers the article well — the one about the “secret Santas” who picked up kids’ letters to Santa Claus from the post office and then showed up at their homes bearing gifts from the North Pole.

The story made an impression on Flaxman, who, at that time in the mid-’80s, was about to open in a new show as an actress/singer in New York. She proposed to fellow cast members that instead of exchanging opening-night gifts, they use the money to help people in need. “Everybody just loved [the idea],” she recalled. They ended up with enough for a couple of families.

But Flaxman didn’t stop there. With one daughter, four sisters and 11 nieces and nephews, she suggested her idea to her own large family. First, the adults agreed to stop exchanging presents and spend the money on those less fortunate. “Now, we involve the kids,” she said, who not only give, but must give up their presents to give. It’s eye-opening, “for them to see that kids their age are asking for CDs, but also for shoes and socks.”

Since joining the UCLA Film and Television Archive staff five years ago, Flaxman, an assistant to the director, has gotten her colleagues involved as well. Every December, she contacts a social worker at the medical center who identifies needy families that have loved ones in the hospital and informs them that a university department wants to brighten their Christmas. Then Flaxman collects money from her coworkers and purchases items on their “adopted” family’s wish list.

For Flaxman, helping in this way adds a personal touch to the holidays. “You feel connected,” she said. “You’re not just putting money into an envelope and sending it away.”

— S.S.

RON GARDUNO

For more than a decade, staff members from across the campus have known Ron Garduno as UCLA’s workers’ compensation risk coordinator. But that’s not how the children from East Los Angeles know him. To them, he is the storyteller who drops into their classrooms just before the holidays with a bilingual version of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Since 1974, when Garduno was a student at East Los Angeles College, this holiday tradition has played out over the years at 15 to 20 schools where teachers somehow learned of the storyteller who captivates kids with such verses as “Saint Nick in a sleigh with a big red sombrero/came dashing along like a crazy bombero.”

Children’s eyes brighten when they hear the Spanish phrases he drops into the rhyme, and visiting mothers tear up as Santa exclaims “Prospero Año Nuevo a todos y Feliz Navidad.”

But even before Garduno gets into the poem, he sneaks in a prologue, revealing his real motive. In his Santa hat and serape, he talks to kids about staying in school.

“This is something I do that comes right from my heart,” said Garduno, who has gone to dozens of schools with the same message long after the holidays have passed

Eight years ago, a young man wearing a USC sweatshirt came up to him while Garduno was standing in line in a store. “Do you remember me?” the teenager asked. “Four years ago, you spoke at Montebello Junior High School about staying in school. I got the message. I heard what you said, and now — I got a full ride at ’SC.”

Garduno was speechless. “All I could do was nod my head. I had tears in my eyes. If I can touch one or two young people like that, then it’s all worth it.”

— By Cynthia Lee

ISHIYAMA and AKARAGIAN

Not many travelers pack surgical drills for their trips abroad, but a UCLA medical team did just that twice this year — in March and November — when they donated their time and services to travel to Armenia to perform the region’s first cochlear-implant surgeries.

“It’s really so different from what we know here,” said surgeon Akira Ishiyama, associate professor of head and neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “All of the infrastructure and the machinery they have are so outdated.” Working with him to give seven deaf children the gift of hearing were audiologist Stanton Jones, anesthesiologist Denise Hawkins, surgical nurse Diane Sennott and nurse Salpy Akaragian, director of the UCLA International Nursing Center.

The cross-cultural project was a few years in the making; team members had to train their Armenian counterparts from the Erebouni Medical Center.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit Armenian International Medical Fund raised money to cover most of the expenses, including the purchase of state-of-the-art screening equipment.

All the preparation and hard work paid off. “The whole country was talking about these surgeries,” said Akaragian, who speaks Armenian. “They called the project ‘Man-Made Miracles.’ ”

For Ishiyama, the experience was also a personal triumph. “These were completely deaf people. [It’s] very rewarding that you can make them hear,” he said. “I take a lot of pride in doing this.”

Akaragian echoes Ishiyama’s sentiments. “I will never forget the parents’ emotional reaction when we told them the surgery was successful,” she said. “I felt good about it. I feel like I have done my deed in this world now.”

— S.S.

RICK SENDELE

Architect Rick Sendele, director of building projects for Housing and Hospitality Services, helps oversee about $110 million worth of construction and renovation of residence halls and apartment complexes.

Come June each year, Sendele begins work on another building project using cardboard, tape, glue and imagination. With such tools, he’s built an 18-foot-high farmhouse, an Olympic stadium, a giant wooden crane with a moveable arm, a lifeguard stand and beach scene, a bus and library. Although they are mere stage sets, they are real enough to the 250 children from the Irvine community who attend the weeklong Vacation Bible School (VBS) hosted each year by Sendele’s church, the Irvine Presbyterian Church.

“That’s what happens when you let architects loose,” said Sendele, who works with another architect/church member over eight weekends to build elaborate sets that match each year’s biblical theme. “We love doing it. Call it divine inspiration. And when the kids walk into that sanctuary and see the set for the first time, they go crazy!”

The sets become gathering places for talks, skits and performances. One year, the architects set up an archaeological dig and had the pastors, dressed like Indiana Joneses, swing into the sanctuary on ropes.

Students raise money to buy necessities for the poor in Tijuana, where the church buses parishioners three times a year to do good works, such as building homes. An usher, Sunday school teacher and fund-raiser, Sendele and his family participate to the fullest in these outreach efforts.

“Our mission is to love each other and to share our love with the community and the world,” he said. “We take that very seriously, but we also have fun doing it.”

— C.L.