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-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

One way we are offering the Health as Right after school program to high schools is through partners such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, who resettle hundreds of refugee families in our area each year. They are observing that the youth they work with experience great emotional turbulence as they are thrown into a new culture, as they carry trauma from atrocities they have escaped at an age in life that is turbulent as it is. So our partners are connecting us with the schools where their resettled youth are enrolled. Perhaps our program could create a support group for them to cope with the pressures of a new culture, in addition to empowering them to take ownership of this community.

The other day, Catholic Charities and I visited Annandale High School, which has a large ESL program for CC’s clients.
“Our clinic provides free medical services to anyone without insurance. We also do free physicals for students to get enrolled in sports,” I said to the meeting of teachers and counselors. At schools where the refugees will be our student leaders, these services are equally relevant as our empowerment program.
“Do you do dental care?” asked one teacher.
“Do you do eye care?” asked another. “We have one student who is always squinting because he needs glasses but can’t afford a pair. Then he tells me that he has a headache, and it’s no surprise,” she described.
“I will bring these questions back to our physicians,” I took notes.

“Yes, we can provide all of those,” said our director Alhan once I got back to the office. Either we have a specialist in our network willing to provide their services to our patients or we will cover the costs for our patient to see a specialist. I sat down there in the clinic kitchen and happily relayed the response in an email to our teachers and counselors at Annandale. “We would also be happy to cover the cost of your student’s glasses if need be,” I included. I should have known the answer because the greatest wrong at our office is to utter “no.”

Tomorrow, I visit the International High School at Langley Park in Maryland, where 100% of the student body is immigrants and refugees.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home… they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends, the factory, farm or office where he works… Unless rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

#healthasright #cultureofhealth #youthteams