By Marley Seaman
For the last year and a half, Hobbes has found help through the Teen Girls Club at the World Trade Center Family Center, which was created by South Nassau Communities Hospital. Every other week, she meets with a group of seven Nassau girls her age in Rockville Centre. Through the center, she has found a community, and like thousands of others, she has found a way to deal with tragedy.
"[The girls] sort of have become a sisterhood," said Dr. Toni Tarnell, the club's facilitator. Together the girls go to dinners, on overnights, to Broadway shows and on rock-climbing trips. They have fun, and they help each other out.
"I feel a lot better now that I know people my age," Hobbes said. "It helped me be able to talk about it."
Because of the assistance they have received in the last few years, many of the girls wanted to find a way to give back. When Tarnell learned that several of them were fans of the ABC show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," she saw an opportunity.
"We're working on a resiliency model, and helping them integrate into doing whatever teenage girls do," said Dr. Beth Culkin, supervisor of programming at the WTC Family Center. "They develop skills that will help them meet challenges in their lives as they occur."
Tarnell called ABC, and in mid-August, the girls were invited to Maryland to help complete a home makeover. In the days before their arrival, volunteers had set up a new home for a domestic abuse survivor and her eight children. The girls from the Family Center saw the completed house and helped prepare it for the family to move in. "The girls found it to be a very profound experience," Tarnell says.
"We were there the day before the 'reveal,'" Hobbes remembers. "We made beds and put some clothes away. Some of the other girls loaded up the fridge and the cabinets. ... We put all those final details together."
The girls assisted the family, met "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" host Ty Pennington and may get some airtime, but there was also a deeper purpose to the adventure. "It allows them to notice the kind of challenges that other people face," said Culkin. "It's healing from them to help others, so they're not always the person in need of help."
The episode will air on a Sunday night in October, so Hobbes doesn't know how it will look on television. But she does remember the way the family responded to their new home. "It was so amazing to see them so happy," she says.
And she's glad for the opportunity to help others. "It gave me a chance to pay it forward, as we say," says Hobbes. "To pay the help that helped us."
