Community Partner Spotlight: RotaCare San Rafael
RotaCare San Rafael has been a long-time community partner with our Service-Learning program. After a long pause during the pandemic when the clinic was not open, we are glad to restart our work together.
Rotacare is a free clinic that serves predominantly Spanish-speaking patients with no other access to healthcare. For this reason, most of the Dominican service-learners supporting RotaCare have been Spanish-bilingual students who are trained to interpret for the English monolingual volunteer physicians at the clinic. Julie Breuer (Biology ’23) was one of the bilingual service-learners that gained experiences as a medical interpreter in the Spring 2023 semester. For her Power of Words: Cultures & Conditioning class, she produced a short video about what she learned about the unpromising reality of the American Dream from conversations with the immigrant patients at RotaCare.
Service-learners who don’t speak Spanish can also support the operations of the clinic doing patient in-take or serving as a Scribe. Azan Yousaf (Biology/CASC ’25), a student in Dr. Jennifer Lucko’s Community Engaged Research Methods this spring ’23 continued the work with Rotacare that he had begun in the fall semester. Azan gained a lot of insight regarding the complexity of hyphenated identities of BIPOC. As a first generation Pakistani immigrant from a middle class family, he finds himself very privileged in his access to healthcare compared to the uninsured patients at RotaCare. One particular patient with high A1C (blood sugar) level taught him an important lesson:
“…their A1C level kept on increasing over time, and it seemed to me that they weren’t taking care of their health. It wasn’t until the second interaction that I talked to them that I learned that this was the first time in years that they were even able to see a doctor or get labs done. As someone who has an annual check-up every year, I can see results that can allow me to make lifestyle changes effectively. I was blinded by my own privilege.”
Watch the rest of Azan’s short presentation at the S23 Service-Learning Symposium :
