Just months after suffering a diabetic coma and stroke in May, former farmworker Modesto Hernandez-Leal is well on the road to recovery, aided by community health workers Andres Parra Conde and Griselda Mendoza Vargas.

“They helped me a lot. I am a person who … has so much gratitude toward them,” Hernandez-Leal said in Spanish, with Mendoza Vargas interpreting into English. “That’s why I hope they have a lot of good luck and happy life. As a friend, I wish them well.”

Mendoza Vargas and Parra Conde first met Hernandez-Leal at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, where he spent 26 days after his stroke.

They had recently been hired by Catholic Community Services of Western Washington to fill the newly created positions of community health worker at Villa Santa Fe, a Catholic Housing Services apartment building in Bellingham for farmworkers and their families, where Hernandez-Leal lives.

Their jobs, part of the Catholic Healthcare Collaboration, are intended to help residents overcome barriers like language, legal status and cultural differences, connecting them to health care services.

Hernandez-Leal said he came to the U.S. from Guerrero, Mexico, in 2005, picking blueberries wherever he could find work. Today, he receives a pension from the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries, Parra Conde said.

When he suffered the stroke, Parra Conde and Mendoza Vargas hadn’t completed their job training, “but this was an emergency,” said Mary Escobar Wahl, CCS network builder for the Northwest Region, who is their supervisor.

“We visited him at the hospital because he doesn’t have family here close to help him,” said Parra Conde, who also speaks Spanish.

They worked with his discharge planning nurse, facilitating his appointments for rehabilitation services and obtaining needed equipment, like a walker. One of them was always present during appointments, “to be a partner so they could hear what the therapist was saying, and then they could reinforce it with him,” Wahl said.

“We would see him at least two to three times a week,” Mendoza Vargas said.

PeaceHealth, a partner in the Catholic Healthcare Collaboration, provided training so they would know how to properly move Hernandez-Leal, Wahl said.

The first time Mendoza Vargas saw Hernandez-Leal in the hospital, he was uncooperative and aggravated, just wanting to go home after being there for so long, she said.

“Once he got home and I made that connection with him, he was so much happier, he seemed so much better, he was answering and talking to me,” she said. “It shows that I’m there and I’m listening to him, and it makes him feel good.”

Hernandez-Leal’s case provided serious on-the-job training for these community health workers, but it likely will be the exception in their day-to-day work.

Most residents at Villa Santa Fe will need things like a referral to a doctor or dentist, information about having their children immunized or how to access resources like food and clothing banks.

“We’ll be helping people in many different ways,” Mendoza Vargas said.

With the help of the community health workers, Hernandez-Leal now understands he must take care of his diabetes if he wants to get healthy and “be his old self,” Mendoza Vargas said.

“I eat, take my medicine and I feel good,” Hernandez-Leal said. “Thank God I feel good.”

Northwest Catholic - December 2023/January 2024