Month: December 2013

The several hundred migrant workers who flood Albemarle and surrounding counties every apple season have come and gone. But the community of nonprofit health care providers that supports them each season is already thinking about next year.

The Blue Ridge Medical Center (BRMC), which provides medical care to more than 10,000 patients each year in some of the most rural and impoverished areas surrounding Charlottesville, has been using its mobile clinic since 1999 to serve many who would otherwise go untreated, including migrant farm workers. Strapped for cash due to a lack of donations, the nonprofit wasn’t able to send its mobile health clinic into the orchards in Albemarle and Nelson counties to serve permanent and migrant orchard workers during the picking season, leaving an unknown number of people in a dangerous line of work underserved.

There are seven major migrant camps and extension camps in Albemarle County, ranging in size from about a dozen workers to about 60, with a couple of hundred more workers in the Nelson area orchards for the season, which ended last week. According to police, health care workers, immigrant rights advocates, and the workers themselves, the vast majority of the migrants travel legally from Mexico to Virginia on H2A agricultural visas requested on an individual basis by orchard owners. But upon arriving in the state, they are met with a series of obstacles. Most of the workers are unable to buy or rent a car while they are in the country because of financial constraints, so they are dependent exclusively on the orchard owners for transportation: to get groceries, go to the post office, and get health care treatment.

“Transportation is limited for guest workers who come from outside of the country,” said Christianne Queiroz, program director for the Virginia Farm Workers. “They usually have to depend on their employer, but that’s limited to one time a week for a trip to the grocery store. Farm work is one of the most dangerous professions in the country and people are really in need of medical care, whether it’s preventative or something more serious.”

Many of the orchard workers don’t speak English well, which makes communicating and interacting in the surrounding communities difficult. As a result, migrant workers often feel isolated and unable to seek out services like medical care.

And they need it. Exposure to pesticides is constant among farm workers and the harmful effects that can arise as a result often go overlooked outside of the farms and orchards themselves. Health care advocates say part of the problem is ignorance of the chemical and pesticide world within the medical field.

“One of the things I’d really like to see are doctors specializing in detecting pesticides so people could be treated and could develop claims for pesticide poisoning,” said Queiroz, at a recent Hispanic Services Summit held at the BRMC’s facility on Route 29 where legal experts, health care providers, and representatives from a local church and orchard met to discuss how the Latino and migrant farm working populations can be better served.

“We’ve had people with rashes,” said Queiroz. “And doctors are not generally trained to address that specific cause, so they feel a little reluctant to affirm that something is caused by pesticides when it can be caused by so many other things.”

Several farm workers interviewed for this story said they either personally experienced a rash from working closely with pesticides or knew of coworkers who had, but none of them would go on the record for fear of losing their jobs next year. Others in the health care community have been told by orchard owners that they are not allowed to visit their private farms during certain periods.

In an effort to break through cultural, linguistic, and geographical barriers to ensure the farm workers get the health care services they need, the Blue Ridge Medical Center has been carting around its mobile unit, which resembles a giant moving truck housing a sleek exam room and medical supplies.

But this year, according to center Executive Director Peggy Whitehead, BRMC couldn’t afford to hire the nurse practitioner who typically accompanies the mobile clinic. With only 18 percent of its budget coming from federal funds, the medical center has relied on grants and donations from area residents and farms. But they didn’t come through in the numbers necessary this year.

“Everything we do on the outreach level is funded through grants and donations,” said Whitehead. “And that’s getting a bit more difficult to come up with. We do a really good job of getting services to people now, but in the future I see more and more difficulty finding the funding to make that happen.”

The Lovingston-based center has tried to keep up with the area’s needs. But with limited funds, it had to prioritize its services to orchards closest to its home base. As a result, hundreds of local farm workers likely never saw a visit from a health care provider this fall.

One orchard worker, who has lived in the area for years and did not want to be named, said she heard the center was short staffed and wasn’t accepting new patients. Luckily, she said, the orchard reached out to the center directly, which ultimately sent a health care worker to the camp. But other area camps had received similar word about the center’s financial state and likely did not inquire further, the worker said.

The center charges the poorest of its clients—which include most migrant workers—about $30 per visit, which covers lab and diagnostic work as well. Some in the Latino community have suggested that the orchard owners themselves pony up money for the medical center as a makeshift health insurance plan for their employees. But Whitehead and the center’s head of its rural health outreach program, Vanessa Hale, stressed that these are not huge corporate farms. They are mom-and-pop operations with relatively low bottom lines.

“These growers, while they’re big for Nelson and Albemarle County, they’re still small family farms,” said Hale. “I’m not saying they couldn’t pay more for the service they receive. However, it’s not like it’s some huge multinational corporation grinding down on these workers. It’s more complicated than that.”

To bolster their ranks, Hale oversees eight health promoters at the Blue Ridge Medical Center who volunteered more than 350 hours this year to visit with migrant and permanent farm workers at the various camps, determining their needs while giving them information about various health care issues like diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity risks.

Henry Chiles, who owns the Chiles family orchards, said he and his managers try to make sure all of their workers get the health care access they need, providing them with transportation if need be.

“As far as I know, everyone’s been taken care of and is in good shape,” said Chiles.

And there’s hope that the underfunded BRMC program will be back on wheels next year. Whitehead said the group has hired a part-time bilingual nurse practitioner, and that the provider shortage shouldn’t exist next year

“By the time we get to the season again next year, we should be in great shape,” she said. “It shouldn’t be so difficult.”

Check c-ville.com daily and pick up a copy of the paper Wednesdays for the latest Charlottesville and Albemarle news briefs and stories. Here’s a quick look at some of what we’ve had an eye on for the past week.

Gone to pot

Virginia State Police made a major dent in local pot production in a two-county bust that netted the arrest of two men, a million dollars of marijuana, more than 40 weapons, and $14,000 in cash. According to a police press release, the men, Floyd J. Suddarth, 65, of Fluvanna, and David C. Ragland Jr., 64, of Schuyler, were arrested in early October and have both been charged with possession with intent to distribute marijuana, manufacturing marijuana, conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and conspiracy to possess marijuana with intent to distribute. Suddarth is also charged with possessing a gun and marijuana.

The arrests came after state police received a tip that led them to discover 110 plants between 10′ and 12′ high growing off Kidds Dairy Road in Fluvanna. Police estimate the street value of those plants at $330,000. Additional searches of Ragland and Suddarth’s homes yielded another 172 pounds of marijuana, with an estimated street value of $602,000 (a per-ounce cost of nearly $220), along with the weapons and cash.

Both men are being held in the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange, and are scheduled for preliminary hearings on December 17 in Fluvanna County District Court.

Correction: David Camm Ragland Jr. does not have a previous conviction in Nelson County. That is a different David Camm Ragland.

AccessUVA gets chopped 

In an effort to reverse the ballooning costs of AccessUVA, the nine-year-old program that provides grants to low-income students, the UVA Board of Visitors has voted to replace $7,000 in grant aid with loans for new students starting in 2014, according to The Daily Progress. The cost of the program had nearly quadrupled from $11 million in 2004, its first year, to $40 million this year.

Critics of the cut include current AccessUVA students, who will not be affected by the change, but who believe reduced assistance will discourage poor students from attending UVA, which is already rated one of the least socioeconomically diverse public institutions in the nation by the New America Foundation.

UVA spokesperson McGregor McCance defended the move as necessary to prevent the program’s future costs from soaring, and President Teresa Sullivan expressed hope that additional cuts won’t be necessary. She hopes to start an endowment that will permanently support AccessUVA, she told the Progress, and she put her money where her mouth is by promptly donating her own 2 percent raise to AccessUVA.

Alexis Murphy search continues, another girl missing

Nearly four months after 17-year-old Nelson County teen Alexis Murphy vanished on August 3 after tweeting she was going to Lynchburg, her friends and family conducted a search on Sunday, December 1, scouring the stretch of Route 29 between the Liberty gas station in Lovingston, where Murphy was spotted on surveillance video the day she disappeared, and the property on which suspect Randy Taylor lived, according to The Daily Progress. Searchers, who included members of Murphy’s family, were briefly asked to leave the property by Louisa Turner, the mother of Taylor’s son. Turner’s mother owns the property, according to Nelson County property records, and after a tense encounter between Turner and searchers described by the Progess, Turner permitted the search to go on.

Two days before the search for Murphy, another 18-year-old woman vanished from Lynchburg, about 30 minutes south of Shipman, where Murphy lived. Jamisha Gilbert was last seen by friendson Friday morning, November 29, according to accounts in the Lynchburg News & Advance. Her car, a 2002 burgundy Honda Accord, was found wrecked several hours after she was last seen. Authorities suspect foul play and have set up a hotline for tips in Lynchburg at (434)455-4090.

New Northside Library design gets nod from county review board

The Northside Library is one step closer to getting a new home in a Rio Road warehouse.

In a Monday meeting, the Albemarle County Architectural Review Board granted conditional approval of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s plans to move the Northside Branch—the county’s busiest library—from its overcrowded storefront in Albemarle Square to a three-acre property on West Rio Road that used to house part of Phillips Building Supply. Officials originally sought approval of their plans for the $11.8 million project in September, but were sent back to the drawing board to make design changes.

Ohio-based architecture firm HBN’s updated design features a blue-and-yellow facade that drew criticism from some observers at the meeting, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow. But despite the criticism and some concern from the board’s chair about the affordability of the project, CT reported the ARB cleared the plans, pending further review of a proposed book drop-off.

Library officials hope to break ground in February and open the new library by next October.—C-VILLE writers