Voices of Esperanza: Cyndi Diaz
For Esperanza Health Center medical assistant
Cyndi Diaz
, who has been an Esperanza staff member since 2008, every day presents a new opportunity to love and serve our patients. She welcomes patients with a smile and an attitude that says, "I care!" Her natural ability to connect with others at a professional, personal, and spiritual level is an amazing gift. Patients often call Cyndi just to hear her voice or to ask her to pray for them, and Cyndi goes the extra mile to help a patient, especially our many uninsured patients. As Cyndi explained:
“I did not grow up with my dad and when I began to develop a relationship with him as a young woman, he died two weeks later. I often think about what more I could have done for him. In my work at Esperanza Health Center, I love my dad through caring for my patients. I laugh and cry with them and we share life stories. Their energy—good or bad—gives me life and purpose every day.”
She has been deeply impacted by the patients she serves and seeks to love them the way God loves them.
Cyndi is proud to be a member of the North Philadelphia community in which she works, and often speaks about “keeping it real” with our patients so that they are motivated to improve their health. One of her more recent patients struggled with loneliness after learning of a diagnosis he had just received. Recognizing this, she connected the patient with a mentor to provide hope and encouragement.
Cyndi is very creative and takes initiative to make work flow more smoothly for everyone involved. For example, Cyndi mans the patient appointment schedule “like an air traffic controller,” as one of her colleagues put it, moving patients around so that those who come early can be seen, and freeing up the schedule for other patients. Cyndi was part of a committee tasked with evaluating and recommending work flow changes across all departments. She is also involved in many other ways at Esperanza, whether as our unofficial champion for World AIDS Day every December 1st, where she mobilizes the entire staff to wear red (including red lipstick!), or by singing the National Anthem for a hotly-contested staff basketball game.
A Scripture passage that motivates Cyndi in her work at Esperanza is Romans 4:4-5: "If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift." (Bible translation from
The Message
version). As Cyndi explained:
"
This verse to me is applicable literally to the job I do
—
but beyond that, it applies to all of us. Where we come up short, where our skills, abilities and talents are not sufficient, God comes in abundance to “make it happen"...to bring things into completeness. God makes us whole, even if things are not perfect or as we planned. He still makes, fulfills and meets us in our needs, which may very well be beyond what we initially thought."
