She is now receiving regular booster shots of fulfillment as the health care advocate, adviser and ambassador for Haitians in her church who were fortunate enough to escape the terror that now reigns in their homeland.
The story of Mitchell’s involvement begins about five years ago on the day a Haitian woman named Francoise walked the short distance from her West Side Springfield apartment to Grace United Methodist Church at the corner of Main Street and Bechtle Avenue Avenue.
Francoise “wanted to see if it was OK to come to church, and I said great,” recalls Pastor Vicki Downing.
In what also has happened at other churches, Francoise “invited people she knew, and they came,” said Downing. In all, 32 Haitians have attended Grace, with some having since left for Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
“We’re thrilled” about new members, Downing said. “We’re not just choosing people we like and inviting them; God calls us to welcome people.”
And like so many of Springfield’s faithful, the people at Grace are answering the call.
Three years ago, while Mitchell was searching for a racially mixed congregation, she visited Grace and found the perfect fit.
She also found non-English speaking members trying to make their way through a health care system she had inhabited for half a century as a nurse at Community Hospital and as a nursing instructor at Clark State Community College.
The most active of five Grace members involved in the work, Mitchell said she spends eight to 10 hours a week untying knots, solving headaches and dealing with the kind of “stuff,” as she describes it, that leads native English speakers to throw up their hands and experience the symptoms of road rage.
The number of hours doesn’t account for the schedule juggling she does to run to her patients’ various appointments.
Tiupaul and Theline
When I first talked with her last Monday, there were three helpings of “stuff “on Mitchell’s plate.
One involved husband and wife Tiupaul and Theline, who Mitchell says want “very much want to be Americanized.”
Theline, who “lived in Barbados for a couple of years” and speaks English, had called her the night before asking whether she should take Tiupaul to the emergency room for a severe toothache.
To help them and the emergency room sidestep some “stuff,” Mitchell advised against it, then called a dental office that “got him in on noon Monday.”
Because his employer does not allow for unexcused sick days, Mitchell had the dentist’s office fill out what she thought were the required forms his workplace requires to account for absences.
Enter “stuff” 2.0: When Tiupaul turned in the papers, the company asked him to fill out federal Family Medical Leave Act forms.
Although familiar with FMLA from medical appointments, Mitchell had never worked with a dentist on them. It also was new to the dentist, who wasn’t sure whether he was authorized to sign them.
The result: After our morning interview, Mitchell planned to go with Tiupaul to the company’s Human Resources department to explain the reason for the delay in the forms while trying to find out whether the dentist could sign them.
Her first visit to that office had a second goal: to have personal contact with HR staff she might work through similar “stuff” again in a progressively more trusting relationship.
Over her long career, “I’ve always befriended the nurses” at various office and “built a relationship with them,” Mitchell said.
All this is vital to her past and current role as a health care ambassador and advocate.
Fact and friction
In working with Grace’s Haitian members, Mitchell says has found what many area employers have about Haitians: “They do not abuse drugs, they do not smoke, they do not use alcohol.”
In addition — and like immigrants of so many generations — ”They send a bunch of money every payday to their family.”
She then mentioned two cultural differences from Americans: Haitians she worked with aren’t as faithful to the clock and “can be very blunt when they’re talking” — a bluntness seldom lost in translation.
Mitchell had used her best desk-side manner to help Francoise get her medical needs met that morning in a follow-up visit to an appointment involving a work-related injury and the “stuff” of the worker’s compensation field.
“I understood what the PA (Physicians Assistant) was trying to get at,” when he asked Francoise what she wanted him to do to deal with her persisting pain, Mitchell said.
The response from Francoise — accurately passed on by an on-screen interpreter — was this: “You’re the doctor. You tell me what’s to be done.”
Mitchell knew that Francoise’s actual goal was to have another image taken to see if it might help identify the source of a paint that had not subsided.
That cleared the air of the emotional “stuff” that can crop up when people of different cultures interact.
The good news
In addition to headaches, her volunteer work has brought pleasant surprises.
“Fortunately, the physicians that we’ve gone to have been wonderful,” Mitchell said. She has supplemented their care with suggestions of her own.
Because Francoise has diabetes, Mitchell told her: “You really need to watch your feet, because neuropathy will happen.”
Meeting that need sent Mitchell to the Clark County Combined Health District, where “good stuff” manifested itself in “a whole folder on diabetic care (written) in Creole.”
After our Monday interview, Mitchell planned to meet Francoise at church at noon to give her the material, then meet Tiupaul at 1:30 p.m. at his company’s Human Relations Office.
Another item on Mitchell’s “good stuff” list has been renewing her working relationships with friends like Ron Gordon, with whom she worked at Clark State but now is at Springfield City Schools.
She called him to find out where a patient of hers should register a child for school. She has similar friends scattered throughout the city’s nonprofits and social service agencies from her years of advising Clark State students who also used their services.
The cherry on top of Mitchel’s “good stuff” list appeared this past week as well.
Francoise, whom she guided to the free English as a Second Language Program available through Clark State’s Aspire program, improved well enough that she’s enrolled in a program there — in nursing.
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