Hello! My name is Anaís Larios-Maldonado, and I’m a rising senior, majoring in Secondary Education and Spanish. I had the great privilege of interning at Oregon Child Development Coalition in the Hood River/Wasco counties this year, specifically for their Peak Harvest Early Education program of The Dalles, Oregon, as a Family Advocate.
Oregon Child Development Coalition, known as OCDC, is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing migrant families an equitable education opportunity for their children while meeting their need for childcare. It is now “one of the largest early childcare and education service providers in Oregon,” serving in counties such as Clackamas, Hood River/Wasco, Klamath, Multnomah, and Umatilla to name a few.
The program that I serve is a Migrant and Seasonal Head Start designed for children of economically disadvantaged, migrant and seasonal farm workers. The families that we serve are below the poverty threshold and receive most of their income from agriculture.
For our center in The Dalles, it is very common to see families traveling from California to work the cherry harvesting season in The Dalles and Hood River. These families are typically working for a short period, as our program is only 4 weeks long, working seven days a week and starting as early as 4 am due to escape the heat.
As Family Advocates, our greatest focus is to assure that our students are safe and healthy. Because our counties are at high risk for COVID cases, we get health referrals from teachers every day to check the students’ temperature and communicate their symptoms with parents. We normally have a medical provider on site who examines children who are feeling ill, and we work directly with them to translate to families, provide cultural context to providers, and make the children feel safe and comfortable.
I’ve noticed that the children can feel apprehensive with medical professionals, especially when they do not speak their home language, as well as the struggle that parents undergo when they are not understood or listened to when speaking about their child’s illness. I now understand the value of Family Advocate positions, and I hope that we can have more culturally competent positions who can facilitate these interactions in other places, such as the medical field.
The children at our center are as young as two months old and up to five years of age. Most of our families are Spanish speakers and are in the county temporarily before migrating onto their next workplace. In this short amount of time, our goal is to maximize the services and support that these families need, such as connecting them to resources like WIC, in some cases Bridges to Health, our partnering clinic One Community Health, and other non-profits around the Gorge.
I come from a migrant farm working household, and I attended the Migrant Head Start program at OCDC when I was younger. For that reason, I feel incredibly grateful to have OCDC as my host site for the Interns for Justice program. It feels as though I circled back to serve the community that once shaped who I am today.