Matamoros, Mexico – Aurora Leticia Cruz has been trying to keep up with her blood pressure medications since she fled Guatemala more than a year ago, but the limbo she is in – stranded in a refugee camp on the Texas border after passing through Mexico – is struggling made.
One day when Cruz felt dizzy as her blood pressure rose, it could have been a tragedy, leaving her 17-year-old granddaughter and two great-grandchildren under 3 alone at the campsite in Matamoros. But instead, an Oregon nurse and a Cuban doctor, who, like Cruz, is awaiting the completion of his asylum application in the United States, managed to review his medical history and prescribe the correct dose.
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The health workers who helped Cruz are part of Global Response Management, a non-profit organization that aims to go beyond crisis response and establish a system to provide medical follow-up to migrants traveling from Central America to the United States. ease. Mexico’s border with the United States. Cruz’s medical chart was created in June by the group, which collected information from patients.
“I see this as a relay run where we pass the medical baton to other health care providers as people move north,” said Blake Davis, a Maine paramedic who volunteers with the organization.
Such efforts are part of a growing trend in humanitarian assistance accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted the difficulties in providing basic medical care to migrants. With public hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, migrants with heart conditions or difficult pregnancies have nowhere to turn. Others have been given ineffective prescriptions because doctors have to treat them without a medical history.
Global Response Management is led by US Army veterans and consists primarily of US volunteers and paid asylum seekers who were medical professionals in their countries. Over the past year, the group has treated thousands of migrants in two Matamoros clinics, including one in the camp.
Medical personnel in the group have innovated to provide healthcare in their austere environment, based on what they have learned from the organization’s work with displaced people in countries such as Iraq and Bangladesh.
They have used telemedicine to consult with specialists in the United States and have connected a wearable device to an iPhone to create sonograms. They have also worked with local authorities in the camp to stop the spread of the coronavirus, encourage the use of masks, increase the number of hand-washing stations and create an isolation area.
Only one person from the camp has been hospitalized with the virus, even as medical facilities in the area worked this summer to accommodate the high number of infected patients.
But the group’s goal isn’t just to serve migrants once they reach the border. He wants to provide medical care along the routes that migrants follow.
“Humanitarian aid needs to be seen in a different light,” said group leader Helen Perry, an Army Reserve nurse.
How long the camp will last is unclear, as U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to reverse a Trump administration policy that has forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait on Mexican soil while their cases are heard in United States courts. States.
In any case, people will continue to flee from violence and poverty in Central America, and humanitarian groups will try to find a way to protect them.
Davis, the Maine paramedic, plans to set up a clinic in Tapachula, on Mexico’s southern border, next year. He recently flew by helicopter over the terrain that migrants pass through in Guatemala to see the challenges medical teams would face in caring for people in transit.
“There’s nothing out there for them to get help,” Davis said. “We want to be able to fill that void.”
The group tries to connect migrants to healthcare and other resources by asking them what they need on WhatsApp. The idea is to get in touch with migrants as soon as possible, address their health problems before they get worse, and create a system where doctors can access their medical records on the go.
It is a daunting task that requires finding the migrants – many of whom are trying to avoid detection – and gaining their trust. Group members should also seek the cooperation of government officials.
And they must be careful that medical data is not used against migrants. As in Matamoros, the group will assign a number to each record instead of a name.
Other support groups also face the challenge.
Next month, the International Rescue Committee will officially launch InfoDigna, an interactive map in Mexico that connects migrants to shelters, caregivers and other services wherever they are. It offers live chats to answer questions from migrants on topics as diverse as the most recent restrictions imposed by COVID-19, to the status of the processes in the immigration courts.
InfoDigna is part of the group’s global digital information service, which provides information via smartphones to asylum seekers from Italy to Colombia.
“He meets people where they are,” said Edith Tapia, the initiative’s coordinator in Mexico.
The organizations are filling a void that has urged WHO to fill the governments of the host country, but few have. The problem of caring for vulnerable people on the move is likely to grow – 80 million people are currently fleeing poverty, conflict and natural disasters, according to WHO.
María de Jesús Ruiz Carrasco said she would have lost her footing had she not been attended by Global Response Management.
The 31-year-old Cuban was rescued by Border Patrol agents who found her along the Rio Grande in October with a broken leg after the crossing from Matamoros.
She underwent two surgeries at a hospital in Brownsville, Texas. But two weeks later, Carrasco was deported to Matamoros with a festering wound and 14 nails in her leg. US Customs and Border Protection regulations recommend that asylum seekers with medical problems should not be returned to Mexico.
The agency said it could not discuss Carrasco’s case due to privacy laws, but if a patient is “allowed to travel” after being released from a medical facility, the asylum seeker could be deported to Mexico. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
A Mexican official at the border referred Carrasco, who was sitting on crutches and in need of assistance, to the Global Response Management clinic, where he met Mileydis Tamayo, a nurse from Cuba who is also seeking asylum. Tamayo has been treating Carrasco’s wound for 10 weeks.
“If this group didn’t exist,” said Tamayo, “a lot of people would be very bad.”