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Two Eugene Area Women Provide Medical Care At The Border

Rachael McDonald

A team of medical providers from Oregon and Washington recently returned from McAllen, Texas where they volunteered at a respite center administered by Catholic Charities. The center, which serves about 300 refugees per day, provides shelter and basic services, including medical care, to migrants who’ve been detained at the U.S. Mexico border.

Pediatrician Lauren Herbert works at Peacehealth in Springfield. She’d been looking for ways to help at the border ever since hearing about the U.S. policy of detaining families and separating children from their parents.

“In the fall, one of the pediatricians who works on the border, Dr. Marsha Griffin, sent a call out asking for help at the respite center in McAllen, Texas.” Herbert says, “And so, I volunteered to go down in January.”

Herbert’s colleague, Chris Heritage joined her.

“I said, find out if they need nurse-midwives or nurse practitioners. I would love to go.” Says Heritage, “And it turned out that that was a good team, to have a pediatrician and a nurse-practitioner working together.”

Heritage and Herbert went with several others from the northwest and spent a week helping at the respite center. Herbert says the center opened in response to the high number of people who were released from the detention center in downtown McAllen with nowhere to go.

“People were having to figure out what to do and so Catholic Charities stepped in and started helping people.” Says Herbert, “Providing food, a place to stay and helping them find their bus to get to their relatives in other parts of the country.”

Herbert says the non-profit rented a former retirement home to accommodate the influx of people.

In addition to meals, showers, and a place to sleep, the respite center offers basic medical care.  

“So, there’s a medical clinic in the back where Chris and I worked and many of the people who came had pretty minor symptoms: headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough. You know, they just needed some medications to help alleviate some of their symptoms. “

Or, Herbert says, just reassurance.  But, there were some more serious cases, including a boy with an infected foot who was helped by antibiotics. Chris Heritage says the respite center seemed to be very well run with a need for volunteers.

“So, the clinic itself depends on volunteers and if you have more volunteers, you can do more triage and if you have less trained volunteers, sometimes people end up needing to go to the emergency room that might have been able to be cared for otherwise.” Heritage says.

Heritage says despite all the stress the people who’d been in detention were experiencing, there was a sense of relief to be able to get basic care and kindness.

“People were so grateful for two aspirin.  They would say, thank you so much because they didn’t have those things. One of the women, she had been robbed during the trip.” Heritage says,  “And she didn’t have her blood pressure medicine. She had one pill left. She was saving it in case she really had some kind of blood pressure crisis.”

And, Heritage says, immigrants were still wearing ankle monitors from being in detention. There was worry about making court dates, getting to family. Herbert says many of the people who’d been detained didn’t seek medical care until they got to the respite center where they felt safe.

“So I just have thought about the role of feeling safe to seek medical care.” Herbert says,  “I think in the respite center people felt safe and they could start paying attention to their symptoms.”

Herbert says for many of the people who came to the respite center, just being treated with compassion after a long, difficult journey and being detained in prison, made a difference. Heritage agrees.

“I think as a country, we value compassion.” Heritage says,  “We pride ourselves on being a caring and compassionate country. And I would like to see the conversation or the things we’re saying about what’s happening in the border reflect that value of compassion and how we care for our neighbors.”

Chris Heritage and Lauren Herbert both say they’d like to go back to the respite center in McAllen to help again. They say there’s a need for more medical volunteers and for others to help in other ways. They say it helps to be bilingual in Spanish, but it’s not essential.

Copyright 2019 KLCC. 

Rachael McDonald is KLCC’s host for All Things Considered on weekday afternoons. She also is the editor of the KLCC Extra, the daily digital newspaper. Rachael has a BA in English from the University of Oregon. She started out in public radio as a newsroom volunteer at KLCC in 2000.