Thoughts from personal experience on the value of Haitians to local skilled nursing home care.
QUINCY -- Eight years ago after the devastating earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, I went over to the Hancock Park Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center in Quincy for a story.
Richard Welch, whose company Welch Health Care owned Hancock Park, had told me how valuable and even critical the Haitian workforce was to the success of his nursing homes and others in Massachusetts. Many people from Haiti and their family members lived on the South Shore in Randolph and Brockton and in Hyde Park in Boston.
At that point I covered the aging field as a reporter but I was soon to experience all this more directly. Two years later, in 2012, my brother Steve had a stroke and was fortunate to wind up at Hancock Park for his rehabilitation for more than five months. I came to know Haitian workers for the first time.
After that he moved to long-term care at Newbridge on the Charles in Dedham, a Hebrew SeniorLife facility and affiliated with the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale.
There too many of the health care workers are Haitian and they are people of faith, strong-hearted, amazing. I have seen this over and over, in many different ways, and been touched by the grace and dignity of the Haitian workforce. We are fortunate to have them.
Going back eight years, here's what I wrote on Jan. 14, 2010, two days after the earthquake, about Hancock Park in Quincy: "About one-third of the facility’s 168 employees are from Haiti or have family there.
'All were worried about their families, and most had not been able to get through by phone when the assistant director of nursing arrived for work at about 7 a.m. Wednesday.
“Not one of them called in to miss work; every one of them came to work,” Melanie Brace, the nursing manager, said.
"As she sat to comfort one sobbing aide, she realized she could help by offering her staff a time and a place to pray and be together.
“Virtually every Haitian who works here has some relative there,” Brace said. “It was very evident they were very upset. So I was trying to think what we might do to help them know we were feeling very bad with them and wanted to join hands to share their grief.”
"At 7:15 a.m. there was a prayer service in the cafeteria. Employees, including many non-Haitians, sat together. All 25 people in the room were crying, Brace said.
"Then they rose and went about the day’s work, tending to frail elderly, who often tried to comfort them in return.
"Marie Beaupin, 47, of Randolph, on the day shift, had spent a sleepless night. Her husband was supposed to fly home Wednesday from a three-week vacation in Port-au-Prince. She had no way of knowing what had become of him."
It was the first of many lessons I was to receive in how important the Haitian community is in this state and others.
They brought their culture of caring and compassion with them and found work in the home health and nursing home fields. They provided much of the daily hands-on care for vulnerable and frail older people and younger people with disabilities.
It was work others did not want to do, it was difficult if also rewarding, and they brought to it intelligence, skills, composure and often a remarkable cheerfulness.