FIELDS OF CHANGE

Kent State students

care for migrant families.

By Jim Szatkowski, ’80, M.A. ’94

Photos By Gary Harwood, ’83

Two different groups of workers use their hands to ply their trades and work in jobs that some would consider hard and unrewarding. 

One group spends the summer months tending the fields in Northeast Ohio – preparing the ground and planting and harvesting leafy lettuce, radishes, green onions and other crops. 

The other group spends the summer tending to the health needs of those farm workers, making them feel strong, safe and accepted in their temporary homes.

The migrant farmers work near Hartville, Ohio, a small community about 15 miles south of Kent, about 12 miles north of Canton, and a world away from Mexico, the country of their cultural heritage. They travel as a group of families to Ohio every spring and stay until the harvest, planting and tending labor-intensive crops. In the fall, when the growing season ends, they head to warmer southern climates and repeat the process.

The health care workers, among them many students from Kent State University’s adult nurse-practitioner program, also spend their summers near the fields, working in a clinic for the migrant farmers. Language translation students from Kent State assist by interpreting the families’ needs for nursing students.

Dr. Penny Cukr

“I wanted the adult nurse-practitioner students involved in the clinic to see that hard work and poverty sometimes go hand in hand; that we can make a difference for families in the primary care that we have made available; and most importantly, that with the help of our translation students, we can communicate to understand migrant family needs,” says Dr. Penny Cukr (pronounced ZOO-ker), the program director for the adult nurse-practitioner program at Kent State and an assistant professor in the College of Nursing.

The Hartville Migrant Council Inc., which has been in operation since the 1950s, supports the clinic and provides other social services out of a converted house on Swamp Street in the Hartville Migrant Center. The center is close to the fields with the farthest family living less than two miles away.

Nursing students discuss cases during a slow period at the Migrant Health Clinic in Hartville. Kent State graduate students and faculty participate in a program that offers hands-on experience for Kent State students and much-needed care and support for area migrant workers.

Every year, between 300 and 350 people come to the Hartville area as part of the migrant farm work force, including the families of laborers. By reaching out to the migrant workers, Kent State students and faculty, along with Canton-area medical personnel and dozens of volunteers from around the Hartville area, make Northeast Ohio an inviting place to work and live.

Jeffrey Zellers is vice president of K.W. Zellers and Son Inc., the largest farm in the area with 1,100 acres under cultivation. He is the third-generation member of his family business, which has been in operation for more than 80 years, selling salad vegetables from Akron and Cleveland to Miami and Boston. For much of that time, the farm has relied on seasonal workers.

“They’ve been around for longer than I have,” Zellers says. “The government built houses for seasonal laborers here as far back as the early 1940s,” he adds, noting that the local farm labor source was depleted during World War II, as was the case for most domestic businesses.

“Today there is nobody here available to do this work,” Zellers says. The migrant workers return each year, seeking to earn a living; Zellers estimates that the retention rate is about 80 to 85 percent per year.

“Make no mistake about it,” he says, “they are economically drawn, just as you and I would be.” They have an opportunity to earn a better wage than they could at home, and are treated well by the employers, he explains.

If it takes economics to bring the growers and workers together, then it takes two Pennys to connect Kent State students to the Hartville operation. Penelope “Penny” Griffin is director of services for the Hartville Migrant Clinic. Dr. Penny Cukr calls Griffin “the eye of the storm” — the calm center of activity in an operation that involves hundreds of farm workers and dozens of volunteers.

Cukr went out to the migrant center about seven years ago to see if there was a way for the students in her program to gain clinical experience by providing health care for the workers. She worked with then-center director Tom Montgomery to establish a summer program with about 20 Kent State nurse-practitioner students. The two Pennys now continue that effort. Kent State nursing faculty also staff the clinic, along with physicians and nurses from Aultman Hospital and nursing students from Aultman and Malone College.

Interpreter and Kent State student Jessica Buckley, center, helps explain a doctor’s advice during a visit to the Migrant Health Clinic. Nester Medina was nervous about his doctor’s visit for a sore finger. His mother, Ester Maria Medina, comforts him.

Hartville Migrant Ministries is a nondenominational collection of churches and local businesses that work together to make up the Hartville Migrant Council and run the clinic. The clinic is funded largely through a grant from the Canton Area Regional Health Education Network, a branch of the Area Health Education Centers. AHEC was initiated in Ohio in 1978 to promote primary care practice and to educate students in the medically underserved areas of the state.

“And this is a pretty underserved population,” Cukr says. “The students get to see a broad range of health care issues, from pediatrics to adult medicine. They also get experience working with the poor. In this environment, you often don’t have the ability to order a lot of tests, so you have to use your best medical judgment from the information available to arrive at a diagnosis.”

Nurse practitioners must first have a bachelor’s degree in nursing and then complete a master’s degree. They usually practice in the area of primary care. Aside from some occupational skin conditions and work-related injuries, the farm workers and their families suffer medical problems very much akin to the general American population, providing a good training ground for the students, Cukr adds.

The clinic has been able to offer special programs in women’s health and screening for diseases such as tuberculosis. They also are trying to line up ophthalmology and dental care, Cukr says.

But even when the nursing students and other health care workers were ready and willing to help in the clinic, they realized the language barrier was going to be a problem.

Over the years, Griffin says, she noticed that the demographics of the migrant farm workers shifted. “When I started working with them in 1987, about 95 percent of the people were African-American and about 5 percent were Hispanic. That started to reverse in about 1993 and 1994, and now the percentages are reversed. Most of the people are of Mexican descent,” she says.

“Most of us don’t speak Spanish, and it’s mostly the young people in the migrant families who speak English,” says Cukr. “They tried to help translate, but if your translator is a 10-year-old boy and your patient is a woman with gynecological problems, it’s difficult to communicate. About the third year I contacted the Kent State program in translation. We got another grant from CARHEN to cover the [cost of] translators, and it’s been much, much easier since then.”

Enter Kent State’s Institute for Applied Linguistics. The institute is a research and training unit within the College of Arts and Sciences and is affiliated with the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies. The institute and its faculty coordinate the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in translation.

In addition to interpreting for the nurses and migrant families, the translation students help in other areas of the migrant center, assisting with forms, explaining social service programs and providing general translation support. Some have continued volunteering at the center after their program ended.

Cukr says that while the Kent State students and others are getting valuable hands-on experience, they also see the strong work and family values that the migrants bring with them.

“This is very hard physical work, something I know I’m not used to. But these are the people who put fresh fruits and vegetables on your table. They work in family groups. The husbands and wives often work in the fields along with nieces and nephews,” Cukr says.

“The growers are very kind to the workers and generally interested in their well-being. I think they like coming back to this area because so many people care about them,” she adds.

Zellers seconds this sentiment with his praise for the Hartville Migrant Council.

“Our family is very supportive of the council. They do a good job of helping the folks who come here to work,” he says, adding that through the council’s efforts the farmers are made to feel welcome and given a sense of community.

Griffin and the migrant center try to link the families to existing social service and educational programs, such as Head Start, English as a Second Language and General Educational Development services, or find volunteers to start a specific one, such as the retired priest who offers nondenominational Bible study. Several programs are designed to help the children in the migrant families, who accompany their parents to the area but do not work in the fields.

The center also runs a thrift store that sells donated clothes and other household items to the families for 25 cents each. “It’s like a department store, only every item is a quarter,” Griffin says. “It allows the families to get items at a reasonable price.”

The center is open from about the first week of April until the last family packs up and heads down the road to a warmer climate. “It all depends on the weather. It could be anywhere from October 15 to Thanks-giving,” Griffin explains.

Griffin spends the winter making presentations to area groups that want to help out, and coordinating volunteers and donations.

“We get welcome bags together and give those to families as they move into the area. We include pillow cases, sheets and blankets and toiletries,” she says. “We get about 135 families every year.”

The work done at the migrant center changes the lives of all involved: the workers, their families and the Kent State students, who get to see a very different way of life just down the road.

“For everyone involved — students, faculty and physicians — this work broadens the understanding of diverse cultures, poverty and its effect on health,”

says Cukr.

To view a photo essay on the migrant farm experience, visit www.kent.edu/photoessays/June2003