Thread: Laura Perez's experience as an immigrant groomed her for ten

Safe Haven
Laura Perez's experience as an immigrant groomed her for tending to others in desperate need
Sierra Filucci

Friday, March 14, 2008


The men pull their caps down tightly over their eyes as they walk through the clinic door at the crux of International Boulevard and 25th Street in Oakland.

They come with pain in their backs, arms and hands from strenuous work as day laborers. They come with elevated blood sugar levels from eating cheap, accessible carbohydrates. And they come with alcoholism, depression and the anxiety of the poor and undocumented.

On the other side of the door is Laura Perez, a petite 31-year-old Peruvian in form-fitting jeans - part-sister, part-therapist - and not so long ago undocumented as well. She has flourished connecting with immigrant clients, and in October Perez went to Washington, D.C., to accept $125,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for her role as executive director at the Fruitvale neighborhood clinic, Street Level Health Project.

Perez's organization, around since 2000, provides drop-in first aid, such as blood pressure checks and wound treatment, as well as help smoothing the way for more involved treatment at places such as La Clinica de la Raza and Highland Hospital. Set in a patchwork of nonprofit offices called the Oakland Workers Center, the clinic also serves as a gathering place for immigrants to meet, talk and grab a plate of hot food.

Street Level Health maintains a no-questions-asked policy, so anyone can be seen at the clinic. Most clients are recent immigrants, many undocumented and almost all uninsured. All services are free and the staff is largely volunteer - pre-med students, nurses and others - though Perez, the doctor and two others receive salaries paid by grants and donations.

Inside at Street Level Health, Perez zips from room to room, talking to co-workers, clients and visitors, but on a recent Monday, Perez is a bit of a mess. She's in the middle of transitioning from being an outreach worker to being the agency's administrator and, well, she has lost an important document.

"Ah Dios mio," she says quietly to herself as she sorts through piles of papers. "I'm going to be in trouble."

But spend any time at the clinic and it becomes clear why that's unlikely. Her compassion for all who walk through her door, no matter how filthy or troubled, is well known.

"What is the meaning of the word instincto?" asks Alfonso, a middle-aged laborer who has come to the clinic for glasses, as he sits across Perez's makeshift desk.

She forgets the paper. "Instincto?" she asks, squinting and giving him her full attention.

"I am not educated," he says to her in Spanish. "But I like to learn."

She tries to define the word, fumbles, grabs a Spanish dictionary, quickly reads and discards the book's answer, and tries again to explain. Finally, she motions with her arms as if she's touched something hot - "caldo!" - and quickly pulls away - "instincto," she says.

He repeats her pantomime. "Exactamente," she says.

A connection has been made and he's now comfortable enough to tell her about the pain that starts in his thumb and moves all the way up his shoulder. She looks him directly in the eye - any girlishness that flickered across the previous conversation now replaced by a gentle directness.

"Let me see," she says. He holds out his hand - small, brown, stiff - and she takes it into her own, running her finger along the deep scar that rips down the length of his thumb. In the end, she gets him to see a doctor.

It's satisfying work and she's good at it. And then she remembers the missing document. It's a contract between the clinic and the Alameda County Department of Health. Someone from the county is coming this afternoon and she must find it before she gets here.

"Ay ay ay," she murmurs. "I'm really going to be in trouble."

Nearby her mother, who joined her from Peru last year, sits silently in the corner of the pinched office knitting.

Her mother is the reason Perez came to the United States 13 years ago. Perez hated hearing her parents fight about money, so she went out to earn on her own. Just 18, she flew from Peru to Miami using a borrowed passport and visa in an arrangement orchestrated by a family member. She used a fake name, pretended to be 15 years old, and traveled with a woman carrying a U.S. passport. When they arrived at the airport, the woman handed off Perez to an uncle and tucked away her payment. "I felt like somebody's buying me," Perez says.

She spent the next two months in Miami, she says, working as a virtual slave for a Latino family and then found work caring for two white children who lived with their divorced mother. At night Perez slept in a garage with her employer's dogs and prayed the cockroaches wouldn't crawl into her bed.

Three and a half years later, in 1998, she left her job to live with an aunt in Oakland. She was broke. All of the money she earned had been sent home to Peru, but her aunt supported her and encouraged her to take English classes. Another aunt was working at the Women's Choice Clinic in Oakland and she asked Perez to join her one day a week. There, listening to rape victims seeking abortions, the empathy she felt for the women transformed into empathy for herself. Perez began to understand, as she never had before, how poorly she had been treated.

The depression and anxiety attacks that plagued her since coming to the Bay Area, and drove her to attempt suicide, began to dissipate. Her co-workers were different - gay, lesbian, feminist, activist - than those she'd known in the past. And the more she absorbed others' stories - the rapes, the beatings, the hunger - the better she felt. "What I suffered is not what other people suffer," she realized.

This, she says, was her "salvacion."

It was also the clinic's good fortune. She stayed for five years and learned everything from database management to how to draw blood. Her English slowly improved. She married a mechanic who is a U.S. citizen in 2001 and became a citizen herself soon after. During this time, a co-worker introduced Perez to Nan Lashuay, a professor of nursing at UCSF who ran a health clinic in Oakland for immigrant laborers. After a period of on-call work as a translator, Perez became Lashuay's community outreach worker.

"She was so savvy, effective and hard working as an outreach worker - I've worked with many over the years and have never seen anyone to match her," Lashuay, who now lives in Africa, wrote in an e-mail. "It was a joy to watch her blossom in that job."

In that role, Perez figured out how to reach Vietnamese nail salon workers to improve their health conditions. Knowing they wouldn't respond to a program focused on their own needs, Perez says, "We told them we could help them better serve their clients."

When the UCSF clinic closed, its space and much of its work transferred to Street Level Health, which had been a tiny, nomadic clinic and lunch program operated by Alameda County Public Health nurses. Both Perez and Lashuay had served as board members for Street Level Health, and Perez became the clinic's first full-time employee in 2006.

Now, it is a small, but important part of the Latino health services community. This past year, the clinic served more than 900 day laborers, primarily from Mexico and Guatemala.

Now, with the recent hiring of Gerelmaa Bataa, the clinic also serves a significant Mongolian population. A teacher in her native country, 39-year-old Bataa was working in a Bay Area restaurant when Cathy Ahoy, one of the Alameda County nurses who founded Street Level Health, saw her helping a Mongolian family fill out a form at a vaccine clinic. Bataa now helps recent Mongolian immigrants figure out an unfamiliar health care system under the umbrella of the Mongolian Health Access Program, funded by the California Endowment.

Lately, through word-of-mouth (or "mouth-to-mouth" as Perez calls it), women and children have started to show up at the clinic. In addition to basic health services and regular lunches, the center also hosts an informal knitting group - partly facilitated by Perez's mother - and has become a place for men to gather and talk.

The latter, Perez says, is one of the most important aspects of the clinic's work.

"Talking helps them," says Perez. But she's also aware that going to therapy and support groups is taboo for Latino men, so she keeps it casual. "If we make it formal, they won't come. The guys don't trust anyone."

Just a few months ago, Perez hired a case manager to do more hands-on client work so that she can spend more time administering and raising funds. But, she said, giving up the clients has not been easy. Her drive to expand the program is what motivates her to endure the paperwork.

As she sorts through the files and piles, still searching for the document, she uncovers photos of herself with her co-workers and puts one up on her wall. She also finds a plan she drew for the clinic's upcoming expansion and hands it over to Dr. William Wallin, who has just arrived at the clinic.

"I wish there was more room for the doctor's office," he says. "We'll get you a smaller desk," Perez says. "Your desk is too big for you."

A Minnesota native, Wallin, 62, spent three years in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer before making his way to the Bay Area in 1984. He worked for Alameda County for 16 years caring for refugee and immigrant patients in community medical clinics, jails and psychiatric wards. Two years ago Street Level Health received $235,000 from the California Wellness Foundation and used some of that money to bring in Wallin - the clinic's first and only doctor. He sees clients twice a week - Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons. He spends the rest of his week at Golden Gate Fields, where he cares for racetrack workers and their families in a clinic operated by the California Thoroughbred Horsemen's Foundation. "It's not that I have such a big heart or anything," says Wallin. Working with the poor and "downtrodden" his entire career has "just felt very comfortable."

With Wallin still standing in her office, Perez abandons her search for the contract and zips into the clinic's waiting room.

That's when she spots Carlos, a short man with an oversize cap. The brim shadows his face, but doesn't hide the dark red scab that runs the length of his nose. His left arm rests in a homemade sling. Perez sits down next to him, her knee touches his, and she begins to ask him questions in Spanish. He answers in single syllables, not meeting her eye. Slowly he tells his story.

He was down by High and 12th streets, where day laborers congregate for work. It was late, he was a little drunk and two men beat him up. Eventually, he pulls back the hat to show her a bloody gash.

It's clear he needs to go to the hospital and she gives him some advice. Once you arrive at the hospital, she says in Spanish, start complaining: "Oww oww oww!" she pretends. Don't just sit quietly or they'll make you wait 12 hours, she says.

In pure Perez style, she both advises and jokes with Carlos, his boss, whom she calls, "el patron," and his friend - a bulky man in a black leather jacket and jeans speckled with white paint. Tears well up in the friend's eyes as he listens to her soothing words.

Then el patron asks her for the police phone number. He wants to help Carlos report the attack, and, by the way, he says, the friend's brother has been missing for four days.

With this news, everyone - Carlos, his friend, el patron, Perez and the new case manager Meghan Woods - hustle back toward Perez's office. Woods finds the missing man's photo in their database and starts to print up flyers. She takes a digital photo of Carlos and creates a Street Level Health ID card (address: Homeless in Oakland).

A toddler shrieks in the other room. The smell of chicken and rice cooking in an electric pan drifts in. Perez rubs Carlos' shoulder briefly and he and his buddies leave for the hospital.

Once she returns to her office, Perez finds another photo and tacks it up on her wall. "So I can feel happy," she tells her mother, whose turquoise yarn has now become a 6-inch square. Perez sits down at her computer and takes a sip of her now-cold Starbucks coffee. The missing document no longer seems important.

Sierra Filucci is a freelance writer and student at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Oakland. E-mail magazine@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... KUDCKD.DTL

This article appeared on page P - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Now I am feeling warm and fuzzy. Ahhh........Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Warming. Anyone got any mashmallows?