Volunteers step in to aid asylum seekers
TIJUANA, Mexico — When the Honduran boy complained of a toothache, Dr. Psyche Calderon asked the obvious question: “When did the pain start?”
The answer broke her heart.
“When La Mara broke all my teeth and killed all my family,” the 14yearold said.
He said little else about the attack by the infamous Central American gang, La Mara Salvatrucha. Just: “I was the only one that survived.”
Calderon is not a therapist, nor a lawyer or a dentist. She is a general practitioner volunteering to provide care for Central Americans stuck in Mexico while they try to obtain asylum in the United States. There was little she could do for this teenager.
“So I gave him an antibiotic, then went home and cried,“she said.
Calderon is part of a movement of health professionals and medical students from both sides of the U.S.Mexico border that is quietly battling to keep asylum seekers healthy and safe while their lives are in flux.
They try desperately to tend to a need left largely unmet by the governments of both countries. It has thrust volunteer doctors into new and unusual roles where they often have to improvise while working with limited donated medications and equipment and dealing with nonmedical issues. Besides giving patients a pill for pain relief, the doctors might need to direct them to legal help for their cases while offering a listening ear as a kind of therapist to a population suffering deep trauma from violence that forced them to flee their homelands.
With little training or preparation for this type of medical work, doctors like Calderon are trying to come up with guidelines to better treat migrants with emotional trauma.
Tens of thousands of people are stuck in Mexican border cities as their asylum cases wind their way through the U.S. court system under a Trump administration policy that returns them across the border to wait out a decision. Thousands of others wait for their numbers to be called so they can start their claim in a process that meters the number of asylum requests that are submitted to U.S. officials.
Along the U.S.Mexico border, thousands are living in crowded shelters or outside in makeshift tents.
The health crisis spans both sides of the border.
In the past year, at least three children, detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents, have died from the flu while being held.
Meanwhile, in Tijuana, volunteers like Calderon have been setting up weekend, popup clinics at shelters rarely visited by Mexico’s public health doctors.
She helps run the Refugee Health Alliance, one of a handful of such groups along the 1,954mile border.
In the past year, the Refugee Health Alliance has hosted 800 volunteers who have seen more than 9,000 patients; in addition to treatment, they document signs of torture and abuse for asylum cases.
On the group’s 52nd consecutive Saturday at the shelters, the volunteers are given a brief orientation: Don’t ask about people’s backgrounds, which could trigger traumatic memories, or take photographs. Fill out medical forms that ask for a person’s medical history and dates for their asylum process, which could disrupt their care.
Meanwhile, it’s been eight months since Calderon saw the boy with the broken teeth. She still thinks of him. She never saw him again.