Multicultural Prevention Conference of South Florida 2012    

Tina Castańares, MD

I became aware of Tina Castańares while attending my first Migrant Health Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1990. I'm not sure we actually met or even talked, but with her dandelion head of salt-and-pepper hair and her distinctive folk-art wardrobe, Tina cut a striking figure. Nor do I remember whether I attended the workshop she co-presented on Lay Health Programs, though, as I was later to learn, she was, as usual, far ahead of the curve, in this case regarding the great value of community health workers and promotoras de salud.

 

While we must have crossed paths at conferences over the next few years, it wasn't until 1995 that I'm certain we actually talked, and it was because I sang. The occasion was that year's East Coast Migrant Stream Forum, held in Tarrytown, New York, and hosted by my organization, Hudson River HealthCare. I was tasked with speaking at the opening Plenary about the federally-funded Migrant Health programs in New York. As I proudly expounded on our determination to work collaboratively, and by our collective efforts to positively affect the lives of farmworkers across the state, I suddenly stopped. "I think I can sing this better than I can speak it," I heard myself saying, whereupon I broke into an old union song my neighbor Pete Seeger had written the music for:      

 

After singing it through once, I got the audience to join in, and we did it together several times. When the Plenary was over, Tina came up and expressed her complete delight. "We need to do more singing in this movement!" she said, and for many conferences after that fortuitous meeting, we did.  

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MCN is excited to announce we are a recipient of a Susan Harwood Training and Educational Materials Development grant. MCN will use the grant to develop a bilingual picture dictionary or "pictionary" with accompanying training module to bridge the gap between hired agricultural workers and employers to address occupational health and safety in agriculture.

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the US. Agricultural safety and health training, if offered at all, often fails to incorporate principles of adult education and does not adequately address cultural and language differences as well as low literacy levels. MCN's educational materials and training will employ adult education and second language learning principles to facilitate acquisition of basic, fundamental vocabulary both employers and workers need in order to begin to minimize workplace hazards and reduce injuries in agriculture.

These broadly applicable materials will fill an unmet occupational safety and health need and will ultimately benefit workers in a variety of agricultural settings throughout the United States.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) awards the Susan Harwood Training Grants which are part of OSHA's effort to provide both workers and employers in high-risk industries with training and information on job hazards, workers' rights and ways to prevent injuries.

Health Network 

 

 

Health Network is a program to establish continuity of care for mobile patients. We are scheduling Health Network enrollment trainings. If you are interested in this free program please contact Ricardo Garay at (512) 579-4508 or rgaray@migrantclinician.org.

A special thank you:
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