Making Global Solidarity Local

Health Progress, Jul/Aug 2006 by Corbin, Brian R

Catholic Agencies in Ohio Reach Out to a Hidden Immigrant Commmunity

SUMMARY

In an effort to strengthen services for local immigrants, Catholic organizations throughout Ohio are turning to the newcomers' home countries to learn more about their culture and needs. The outreach has helped these ministries to address the challenges immigrants face and to provide services in a culturally appropriate way.

This intensified focus on the newcomers' plight began in earnest in 2001, when three northeastern Ohio dioceses created a collaborative to address the social, pastoral, and legal needs of their "new neighbors." The dioceses established a centrally located site to provide a wide range of services; but, early on, the collaborative recognized that access to health care was a particular challenge for the immigrants.

Wanting to fully understand the newcomers' origins before developing health care solutions for them, representatives from the collaborative visited countries from which many immigrants migrate to Ohio. The trips were instructive: The visitors not only learned about the cultural idiosyncrasies of each area they visited; they also discovered how church organizations there developed solutions to their own health care access problems. The Ohio collaborative has used this wisdom to tailor its health care offerings to meet the unique needs of area immigrants. The ongoing relationship between Catholic organizations in the United States and those abroad continues to yield valuable insights that benefit the immigrant community.

Solidarity helps us to see the "other"-whether a person, people or nation-not just as some kind of instrument, with a work capacity and physical strength to be exploited at low cost and then discarded when no longer useful, but as our "neighbor," a "helper" (cf. Gn. 2:18-20) to be made a sharer, on a par with ourselves, in the banquet of life to which all are equally invited by God.

-Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1987, para. 39

For many years I did not really understand or appreciate the theological insight of Pope John Paul II and the church concerning global solidarity. That changed one day, late on a Friday afternoon in April 2001, when the chancery received a phone call from a social worker from one of the Catholic hospitals in our diocese, the Diocese of Youngstown, OH. The social worker asked for someone who deals with "global" issues. I got the call.

A young man from Honduras lay unconscious in the hospital's intensive care unit, suffering from complications from tuberculosis and immunodeficiency. The hospital's staff was in a dilemma. The patient (whom we'll call Jorge) was in very critical condition and was not expected to make it. A staff member asked whether I could help find Jorge's relatives in Central America to deal with some end-of-life decision making. Wow. This was a Friday afternoon. Where was I to turn?

I called the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) headquarters in Baltimore. Since I had been CRS's local diocesan director for the past 19 years, I figured that I could at least ask someone there how to go about such a search. CRS did not disappoint me. A staff person in the agency's Global Solidarity office was able to contact a CRS staff person in Honduras, who in turn worked with a local agency of Rome-based Caritas Internationalis* to locate Jorge's mother and brother.

In the end, through various, complicated international interactions, the Youngstown diocese arranged for Jorge's brother to travel from his barrio in Honduras to our local hospital. In the meantime, the local probate judge appointed me to serve as Jorge's legal and medical guardian. During this time, I visited Jorge each day in the hospital room set aside for patients suffering from such severe cases of TB. Three days after his brother's arrival, Jorge died. Now I had to work with his brother to close his estate.

For me, global solidarity had become very local.

A "HIDDEN" COMMUNITY

This experience tipped us off to a reality that, until then, we had barely perceived-that there was a "hidden" but growing community of migrant workers and other newcomers in the urban and rural communities of northeastern Ohio. It became apparent that we Catholics needed to reach out to this community. One reason was that the majority of these migrant workers, most of whom had come here from Central America and the Caribbean, were themselves Catholic. But, beyond that, they were in need of the kinds of services that Catholic social service organizations have provided to generations of immigrants.

Before we could reach out, however, we needed information. We needed to know who our new neighbors were, where they came from, how they lived, and what sen ices they required. A survey commissioned by several Catholic agencies counted more than 70,000 immigrant workers throughout the state.

The survey found that the majority of these workers were single males, although there were growing numbers of families and, according to some evidence, children coming to this country to work unaccompanied by parents. More than half of those surveyed were in the process of becoming permanent residents. They had jobs in Ohio's poultry and meat processing industry, lumberyards, mushroom processing, light manufacturing (mostly in plastics), dairy farms, and agricultural production (nursery and fruit farms). Among the needs identified by the survey were education, housing, transportation, work permits, wages, medical insurance, help in relocation of and reunion with scattered family members, and help for family members back home.