Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Nurse oversees injured farmers' return to Mexico

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Sunday, September 19, 1999

Nurse oversees injured farmers' return to Mexico
Housing, rehabilitation cheaper for illegal workers in homeland

Deli Perez thought that by crossing the border and finding work in the United States, he would no longer have to fret so much about his six children and grandson.
   His intent was to send earnings back home to Veracruz, Mexico, where his wife, Guadalupe, would see to it that his brood was fed and clothed. Perez, however, didn't count on misfortune and today is a prisoner of worry.
   It happened on a Florida farm two years ago, where he fell from a tree and broke his neck. The injury left him a quadriplegic.
   Perez, 54, now completing rehabilitation in Houston and awaiting return to Mexico, had toiled on a farm since the age of 8. Like his father before him, he earned a living selling what he cultivated from the land, including beans, corn, bananas, sweet potatoes and yucca, earning $3 a day. But when unseasonable rains ruined his crops, he sought work in neighboring cities.
   He found no such luck there, desperation ultimately leading him to a willing employer in the southern U.S. He had been on the job only two months when a fall would forever change his life.
   Return to homeland
   It is a story with which Corpus Christi rehabilitation nurse consultant Ann Jaime, who is managing Perez's case, is all too familiar. The names may be different, but they are similar in that "they are the forgotten ones, the ones nobody wants to have to deal with," says Jaime, who has been overseeing such cases since 1974.
   Her work takes her to remote mountain villages in Mexico and Argentina, where the "primitive village" cliche depicted in Spanish telenovelas is a fact of life for many families whose homes are huts with dirt floors, thatched roofs, no air conditioning or indoor plumbing. Jaime's job: To find new living arrangements for her paralyzed patients and coordinate their medical/nursing care, paid for by workers' compensation.
   The cost effectiveness of returning workers with catastrophic injuries to their native country is substantial, says Jaime, owner of Rehabilitation Nurse Consultants, Inc. A two- to four-week stay in an U.S. hospital costs $60,000 to $90,000. That same patient with a 30-day hospital stay in Mexico is $3,500.
   Similarly, an injured worker can be given a comfortable five-bedroom, two-story house for $35,000 in Mexico, versus a cost totaling at least three times as much in the United States.
   Providing for loved ones
   Jaime's work, however, is as much advocacy as it is case management, a philosophy that in the past created friction "on all levels, from governmental, legislative, even colleagues," she notes. "It was that nasty attitude that they're here illegally and that it's their fault they got injured. But that attitude has changed and it gives me satisfaction knowing I've been a part of that."
   Perez is one of the lucky ones, Jaime says. Not every undocumented worker is granted such benefits.
   But it is not himself that Perez worries about; family has always come first, like when his youngest child asked to continue school. Perez's other children quit after two years, opting to work in the fields; this one, he says, has a shot at "being much more." Paying for the child's schooling, Perez admits, is what ultimately convinced him to take a chance in this country.
   The promise of a better tomorrow eluded him, Perez concedes, confining him to a wheelchair that's given him more cause to worry about those he'll one day leave behind.
   "I still worry about my family. When I die I at least want to know they have what they need to survive."



Sylvia R. Longoria's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. She can be reached at 886-3718 or by e-mail at longorias@caller.com

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