In a small room in the basement of a Beamsville church, the lives of hundreds of seasonal workers from Niagara’s agriculture sector are being changed one Sunday at a time.
For the past three weeks, Spanish-speaking workers from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala have been able to visit the newly established triage clinic at St. Alban’s Anglican Church to speak to a doctor in their own language.
If they need further medical help, or need to fill a prescription, a translator is on hand to help them.
“As far as I know, this is a first for Ontario,” said Michael Hahn, who is organizing the clinic at the church.
Hahn said getting medical support for Niagara’s seasonal workers has always been tricky. Aside from a language barrier, workers are often reluctant to seek medical help out of fear of losing wages or not being rehired in the following season.
By Grant LaFleche, The Standard - read full article
BEAMSVILLE—It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday and the parking lot is packed.
Smiling faces great each other in English and Spanish interchangeably and they file through the back doors of the church.
“Hola,” says one man holding the door, “Como estas?”
Inside the hallway, Dr. Jennifer Connors hurriedly passes around clipboards with charts.
“These people were here last week but never got seen,” she says to her translator, passing her some charts. She parlays information back and forth from the doctor to the migrant workers.
by Alexandra Heck Grimsby Lincoln News - read full article
Javier Arias serves as the Rector of St. Alban’s Church in Beamsville, a church committed to ministering in practical ways to the Spanish-speaking migrant workers of the area. The story of how God led him to this ministry begins some fifteen years ago.
Javier came to Canada in 2000 from Colombia to work with a bilingual Roman Catholic community in Hamilton. Javier recalls, “At that time, I started to learn about other churches-- the Anglican churches and the Baptist churches, because most people in my country are Roman Catholic, so you don’t see a lot of different churches like here.” Just about the time that he began contemplating shifting over to another church, however, he was relocated to New Orleans to work with Mexicans and Hondurans.
