All work and no play is definitely not a motto by which construction worker Jason Haney lives. Haney, who was helping to build a new wing on Memorial Children’s Hospital in South Bend, Ind., decided to play an epic game of “Where’s Waldo?” with the children at the hospital by hiding an 8-foot-tall cutout of Waldo in a new location every day. On a daily basis, kids looked forward to running to the windows of the playrooms in their units to try and figure out where Waldo was hiding that day. Haney built the red-and-white striped character with the help of his teenage daughter, who was his inspiration for the game in the first place. His family knew all too well what it felt like to have a child cooped up in the hospital for extended periods of time. Haney’s daughter had a stroke in utero, and when she was about 3, Haney and his wife noticed something wasn’t quite right. It turned out that the young girl had brain damage and doctors said that she wouldn’t progress past the third grade level. Fortunately, they were wrong. His daughter is now 24 and has a college degree. Haney’s life-size version of hide-and-seek with Waldo breathed fresh air into the children’s hospital and was a big hit with the children. “It just makes them forget all their worries and their pain for a few minutes, which is tremendous,” said Haney. When construction on the new wing ended, Haney and some of his fellow workers signed the cardboard cutout of Waldo for the kids to keep with them inside the hospital.
