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“I feel like I’m serving a purpose. I feel like I’m helping them. .... I’m helping a portion of the population that is often overlooked.”

By Andrew M. Seder aseder@timesleader.com
Times Leader Staff Writer
Andrew M. Seder on Facebook   |   @TLAndrewSeder on Twitter

ROSS TWP. – The van pulls up and parks in the driveway at the Culver Camp each week from May through September. A group of migrant workers, all men, line up by the back door and greet the three women they’ve become accustomed to seeing.

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Angela Evans, a nurse practitioner graduate student at Misericordia University, listens to the heart of Hector Rivera Macias. The migrant worker is one of 30 men living at a camp near Shickshinny.

Clark Van Orden/The Times Leader

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Christina Shuker and Angela Evans, both nurse practitioner graduate students at Misericordia University, talk about how volunteering at migrant worker camps has enriched their lives.

Clark Van Orden/The Times Leader

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The women don’t speak Spanish; the men don’t speak much English. But they know what the women are there for and they appreciate it. The two Misericordia University graduate nursing students and their professor make the trek week after week to diagnose the migrant workers’ ailments, provide treatment and perhaps bring them a meal or some clothes.

Angela Evans, 44, of Noxen, has been doing this for two years. The five hours she devotes one night a week is strictly volunteer and she loves every minute of it.

“I feel like I’m serving a purpose. I feel like I’m helping them. I’m doing a lot of preventative care. I love the teaching end of it. I’m helping a portion of the population that is often overlooked,” said Evans, who’s in her third year of the four-year master’s program.

The workers, all in the country on work visas, according to Evans, travel throughout the year. They’re in the South in winter months and begin heading north when the weather warms up and the growing season begins. They live at the camp and head to area farms at the crack of dawn and return back at the barrack-type living quarters well after sundown most nights. They make their own meals, they entertain themselves and they spend hours in the brutal sun picking crops that may end up on your table.

“They work their tails off,” Evans said. “It’s very, very sad.”

Professor Cheryl Fuller joins Evans and fellow graduate nursing student Christina Shuker each week and educates both the men and her students.

“This is really the only health care they get,” Fuller said.

The men’s families are hundreds of miles away and yet they work to support them.

Evans said she wishes she could speak their language so she could learn more about them. Where are they from? How many children do they have? What is their wife’s name?

Though there is an interpreter provided by the Keystone Migrant Farm Workers Program in Chambersburg, Evans said it’s not the same relationship she wants with patients. But from past experiences with migrant workers and a mission trip earlier this year to the South American nation of Guyana, she has learned that first aid trumps personal connections.

The common ailments she treats at the camp are issues related to smoking, high blood pressure, allergies and skin conditions like rashes caused often by being in the fields all day touching items laced with pesticides. Evans tries to get across the dangers of smoking and of not treating conditions at the earliest stages.

But the men get paid by each piece of fruit or vegetable they pick and time is money. If they’re heading off to apply a topical cream or to take a pill, they lose valuable minutes. Take a water pill to treat hypertension and that means time spent in the portable toilets.

“For them to take a morning off to go to a doctor, they’re losing money,” Fuller said, noting that there have been a handful of workers this summer who could not be treated by her and her nursing students and were referred to a physician.

Often they live and eat and work in unsanitary conditions. So Evans, Shuker, 45, of Eynon, and Fuller bring the men clean clothes, some home-cooked meals including sausage and peppers and pasta, and some over-the-counter medication donated by a church in Danville.

Fuller, 66, of Dallas Township, has been doing this for eight years. Twenty-five students have participated in a hands-on education that Fuller said “you can’t get in the classroom.”

To see additional photos of the work Misericordia students Christina Shuker and Angela Evans are doing helping migrant workers get health care, visit www.timesleader.com

Andrew M. Seder, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 570-829-7269.