Article courtesy of Mallory Moench '14
At first glance, you would never think it’s a hospital. On the morning of May 10, Mechelle Brown, director of the Gordon College Kids Club, Ashlie Busone ’14, founder of the non-profit Hippies for Hope, Brian Lane ’15, and I arrived at the eighth floor of Tufts Floating Children’s Hospital in Boston bearing buckets of tie-dyed t-shirts. The playroom before us burst with color and natural light, filled with a pool table, air hockey, and pinball machines, shelves overflowing with books, movies, and games, and walls plastered with crafts in rainbow colors. A hand-painted sign in big letters beamed “We love Tufts.” The only signs of sickness, reminders of reality, were the hospital gowns, an occupied wheelchair, and IVs running from wheeled machines to the veins of the kids.
At the first mention of tie-dye shirts, Tareq came bouncing over on the balls of his feet, drinking hot chocolate from Dunkin’ Donuts. It was his first time out of bed in five days. Immediately he wanted to give us a tour of the playroom and play every game with us, challenging Brian to air hockey and giving him a sound beating. Halfway around the room we met Derek, the reigning pinball champion with a high score of 300 million, who showed off his skills to Mechelle. Ashlie and I sat with Virginia (who when asked how long she’d worked at the hospital, just answered “A long time” with a smile), and Telsa, who pulled up to the table in a wheelchair. With careful strokes, Telsa put the finishing touches on a frame she’d colored as a present for Virginia, and when Virginia put it up to her face, Telsa’s own burst into a smile.
Together we and the kids battled each other in air hockey, pool, and pinball, laughing and playing until we pulled out the piles of bright tie-dyed t-shirts. These aren’t ordinary t-shirts, but instead a unique product of the non-profit Hippies for Hope, founded and run by Gordon sophomore Ashlie Busone. Under Ashlie’s vision, t-shirts are hand-dyed by volunteers and either donated to local children’s hospitals or sold, with the profits going to support the organization Nurturing Minds, which funds a girl’s school in Tanzania. For Ashlie, the beginning of this organization and its work was, and still is, deeply personal. She began tie-dying at age 14 in Ballston Spa, New York, when two girls she was babysitting were hospitalized with a life-threatening lung disease. Ashlie visited them in the hospital with the shirts they’d tie-dyed together, and was amazed at the hope and joy that was spread through the simple gifts. She returned later with armloads of shirts to hand out to the other kids in the hospital.
Five years later, Hippies for Hope has grown to an official and thriving non-profit. This spring, Hippies for Hope has partnered with Gordon College’s Athletic Department and The PIT, the Fighting Scots' student fan group, to organize opportunities for tie-dying at sports events. After many hours of tie-dying and the help of dozens of volunteers, we were finally able to visit Tufts Floating Children’s Hospital and donate over 150 t-shirts to the children there.
“I want a purple one!” Tareq promptly announced, and after digging through the buckets, we found one in the right size. Telsa took her time choosing. She wanted to see all the possible shirts in her size and then picked out the six that she liked the best. After much deliberation, it came down to two shirts she loved, and the decision was so hard that we told her to take both of them. Before we left, we gathered around Telsa, and a click of the camera captured our smiles next to each other. Telsa’s grin was a sunburst matching the bright yellow, orange, and red shirt clutched in her arms. “Peace starts with a smile,” Ashlie likes to quote Mother Teresa, and Telsa and her friends showed me that this is true. For their smiles revealed to me, and to us all, what hope and joy can come from “simple things done in great love,” as Mother Teresa calls it – or as we like to call it, tie-dye.
