Farmworker health is community effort in Arizona town of Willcox

WILLCOX, Ariz. — A handful of voices softly chattering in Spanish filter into a building that’s become the heart of Winchester Heights, a Willcox neighborhood filled with farmworkers. The community center is dedicated to connecting southeastern Arizona residents — with one another and with better health care.

“For this community in particular, it’s because they’re so rural and isolated that a lot of the time they can’t go to the doctor,” said Linda Cifuentes, a staff member of the Southeast Arizona Area Health Education Center, or SEAHEC, and coordinator at the Winchester Heights Community Center.

The organization partnered with the University of Arizona to establish the community center, completed in August 2018. In addition to serving as a gathering place for the 600 or so mostly Latino people living in Winchester Heights, the multipurpose center helps educate residents about how to better care for themselves.

“Since they are mostly farmworkers . we’ve taught them about safety in the sun, like using solar protection, and also about cancer and what skin cancer looks like,” Cifuentes said.

Additional training has focused on nutrition, diabetes and treating common problems like a cold or the flu, as well as how to distinguish one from the other.

A mobile health clinic comes to Winchester Heights. Every Wednesday, excluding holidays, the mobile unit parks next to the center to provide checkups and treat people for diabetes, hypertension and common chronic illnesses that disproportionately affect Latinos.

Cifuentes said efforts such as those happening in Winchester Heights could serve as a model for other rural or underserved communities.

“I knew that farmworkers were very much a vulnerable population,” she said, “but I didn’t know to what extent.”