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(Burmese)
When was the time that you were out of your comfort zone?
For me, that time is when I go to the DMV.
I… my palms get sweaty,
as I'm walking in, I find myself standing there,
saying a prayer to myself,
hoping that I have the right paperwork,
that it's filled out properly.
And I find myself like walking up like this.
Please… please have the right paperwork.
And then, when I leave the line and I've successfully navigated that,
that sigh of relief comes over me and I can move on.
In our pop culture, I also think about
George Costanza and the soup line;
As we know, Jerry instructed George very specifically
what he needed to do to get through that line;
what he should do
and what he shouldn’t do.
So as George walked up to the line,
and ordered his medium turkey chilli from the Soup Nazi,
and proceeded forward and paid,
all would've gone well if he hadn't asked for his bread.
And at that moment, he was denied, "No soup for you!"
OK, so these are silly examples
of when people are out of their comfort zones,
but have you ever felt out of your comfort zone
in a medical situation,
may be navigating our health care system?
I have!
This is my daughter Liz.
She's a nurse, she's 26 years old.
When Liz was a teenager, she was diagnosed
with a hip problem.
Her orthopedist at the time told us that she needed
a very invasive surgery to correct her problem,
and that it would be a very, very lengthy recovery,
and her prognosis wasn't even that good
with the surgery.
So not wanting to rush into
this kind of a procedure,
we decided to search out a second opinion.
So while that opinion was helpful,
the second doctor told us,
“No, she doesn't need surgery!”
So that left us feeling equally confused.
So we actually sought out a third opinion
from a Cleveland Clinic.
So why do I tell you this?
Because I speak English, I know the health care system
in the United States,
and this was a difficult situation for me.
What if you lived in the United States,
you didn't speak English,
you didn't know our system,
you didn't know how things worked?
How would that be for you?
We have people that advocate for refugees in our community
that help to educate them on
how our health care system works,
helping to make it a little bit easier
to navigate the soup line of health care in our country.
I decided 4 years ago,
that I wanted to be one of those advocates.
And I want to tell you a little bit about myself,
because this wasn't in my DNA
to be an advocate of this sort.
I had always volunteered at the SPCA
and I'd worked with children,
but working with refugees
who didn't speak English
was really out of my comfort zone.
So I show you this because
this is a neighborhood similar to where I live now.
I live in East Amherst
and it's very, very different than
the west side of Buffalo where I work.
I also grew up in a very small city
in central New York
Fulton, New York, bedroom community,
25 miles north of Syracuse.
And as you can see, very little diversity.
So this was…this concept of myself,
middle-aged woman,
going into the city to work with refugees
who didn't speak English,
was just something that
that was really out of my own comfort zone.
This in contrast, is where I work now.
This is a typical street on the West side,
and this shows a little bit about the contrast between
Fulton, New York and Buffalo.
You can… I think you can
get a good picture of the diversity now,
as compared to the way that I grew up.
This is a very typical neighborhood
when I go out to see women that I work with.
This is… this is very classic of what I see every day.
Now, when I decided that
I wanted to work with refugees in Buffalo,
I was so excited to share with everybody
what I was going to be doing.
So I was telling my family and friends,
“Hey! I’m going to be advocating for women,
pregnant women in Buffalo!"
and I really thought that I would get
a really positive response.
And I did from most people.
But there were a handful of people who said to me,
"Why, are you afraid of getting shot?
Are you afraid of your hubcaps being stolen?"
Well, actually that never occurred to me!
And having been a volunteer for many years,
I figured that what I would get out of that experience
personally was a lot more than
any sacrifice that I would ever make.
So I started working for the Priscilla project.
And what we do is we have women that
work as advocates for our pregnant clients
and they help them to navigate the health care system.
They help walk them through the labor and delivery process
in a friendly way with caring smile
and a loving hug.
We also take the time
to ask the women that we work with,
“How do you feel about delivering your baby here in the United States?"
Now why is that important?
Because when we know where a woman is coming from,
that allows us to better serve her.
So while you may think that
women are going to be very, very excited about
delivering the babies in the United States,
there's also a handful that are very nervous.
They’re tense, they don't really know what to expect.
And maybe these pictures will give you an idea of why.
This is a typical labor and delivery room in a refugee camp,
and this is a good room.
But you can see, it's basic.
There's not a lot of privacy,
and this is what women see
when they go to deliver their babies in their countries.
This, in contrast, is
what we have known to expect in our country.
We look at these rooms and we are met with excitement.
And this doesn't maybe invoke fear for us, for our clients,
the women that we work with,
this is very scary to them seeing all this equipment
and seeing all the different things,
that technology, that is very intimidating for them.
The women that we work with
come from about 18 countries in the world,
and they speak about 20 languages.
And while they all have a very similar experience as a refugee,
we also know that they have very different circumstances
that we need to understand the diversity
they have and to value them as people.
These are two families that I've personally worked with,
that I say, have successfully navigated the soup line,
of healthcare in our country.
The family on your left is a family from Eritrea,
which is in Eastern Africa.
I was present at their delivery and afterwards
the mom invited my husband and I to come to their baby's baptism.
We shared many meals at their home.
This woman makes her own coffee from scratch.
When I say coffee from scratch,
I mean she starts with beans, and
she roasts the beans in front of you, and
she does this whole process that takes about an hour and a half,
but she has welcomed my family into her family,
And she has come to work for our program
as an interpreter.
So she's definitely now taking
the tools that she learned from our program,
and bringing them back into her own community.
The other family on the right is a Burmese family,
and their little baby was actually named after me,
they call her baby Karen.
And also their family welcomed our family into their home.
And, this family needed some assistance with
advocating in the special education arena.
Their child had some learning difficulties,
and as a result of working with me,
the dad was unable to advocate for his family and get services
for the child that he really needed to get to.
This here was the day when we were invited to baby Karen's birthday party.
It was really cool because we brought a birthday cake
and we sat there and, you know,
I'm expecting they’re gonna cut up this cake,
put it on plates for us.
And they gave everybody a fork,
and everybody just dug in and started eating.
(Laughter)
Right! I looked at my husband and he looked at me and we're like…
“Okay! This got to go to flow!”
And after the party they invited us over across the street
to look at their garden.
And they were so proud of the garden that they had.
And after this they snapped this picture.
And this man went on to…
he's now navigating healthcare in Indianapolis
for other members in his community.
Isn’t this baby adorable?
So I also say… so advocacy is great!
And we should do it because we all think it’s a good thing to do,
but what other reasons are there for doing it?
Because when we advocate for women,
they are having better birth outcomes,
and so they're having healthy babies,
and I would say,
that it's important for healthy babies to be born.
When I look at a newborn baby,
I see a face that's full of potential.
Our clients have much better rates
of full-term births, healthy birth rate,
and much lower c-section rates, and why is that?
Because many of our clients, they have been…
they have grown up in a society
where you only went to a doctor when you're sick.
Pregnancy is not a sickness,
so they have not always gone for prenatal care.
We tell them and educate them
on the importance of prenatal care
Good nutrition and getting medical care that they need,
and they comply because they trust us.
We also know that
with premature birth, there is a cost involved.
We know that there's a higher medical cost at the time of birth,
and we also know that over the course of a lifetime,
children that are premies
are going to incur possibly more medical costs.
And those babies are going to face challenges
that are going to interfere with
that clean slate of endless possibilities.
This is a short list of complications from premature birth:
jaundice, respiratory illness, costly NICU stays,
difficulty latching and swallowing, higher risk of cerebral palsy,
higher risk of learning disabilities and the list goes on
and I could tell you over and over again
more things that these problems with premature birth.
So let me go back to my introduction.
When I came out here and talked to you in Burmese,
how did you feel?
Were you uncomfortable?
Were you out of your comfort zone?
What if you heard that all the time
and you didn't understand anything else?
What if you had a friend who was there
to help you to know what was going on
to walk you through the system?
What I said to you was, “Hello! I'm Karen Forster,
I'm happy to be here today,
a little scared and out of my comfort zone.”
Today I ask you to consider being an advocate.
Maybe it's for refugees, maybe it's for the elderly,
children, animals.
We know dogs and cats can't navigate the soup line,
of health care for them, we need people to stand up
for humane treatment for animals, so I ask you to just
…please consider doing something, make a difference!
“Do not wait for leaders. Do it alone.
Person to person.”
So what I say to you today is,
“Step out of your comfort zone,
be an advocate,
and stop worrying about your hubcaps.”
Thank you!
(Applause)