RE: Environmental, Agricultural and Occ upational Health and Safety Educational Materials

[Guest guest]

Having found

myself in and out of health, education and welfare programs; political and

public policy circles and having had something to do with contributing to the

chaos of establishing a host of programs and even organizations such as HACU (I

was one of the three original founders back in the mid 1980’s) I have come to

the conclusion that we need to go back to square ONE. At the heart of the dysfunction

is our fragmented system that is not only culturally dysfunctional for

minorities and the general population but highly inefficient both in terms of cost

but more so in terms of adding to the sense of hopelessness in our communities

and feeding those who see minorities and immigrants and migrants as pathologies

whose health, education and general welfare need to be sustained for the sake

of the historical mudsill theory that the old south used to rationalize slavery

and/or to feed the industry of poverty.

This

reaction is not intended as a chastisement to the MCN nor the specific appeal

being made for the very critical challenge we have on the issue they are attempting

to address. I do mean it as a challenge for all of us in the “migrant health research”

community as I am assuming that our ultimate goal is to improve the quality of

life for those we are purporting to advocate for. I am struggling with a number

of models to refocus both on process and outcome and am in need of critical

discourse and I know there are others out there who are not satisfied with the

status quo. We have a chaotic system yet many of us have been attempting to

untangle the chaos and have our own fractals or understanding of segments of

the dysfunction. It is time that we put the pieces together and form new

systems or tessellations - simple mathematics.

Anyone out

there willing to engage in a discussion on these issues?

Alfonso

Alfonso López-Vasquez, Director

Community Partnerships & Diversity

Assistant Professor

Pacific University

2043 College Way

Forest Grove, OR 97116

(503) 352-3104

(503) 352-2291 (fax)

-----Original Message-----

From: aliebman@...

[mailto:aliebman@...]

Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 7:45

AM

cehncommunity@...;

Groups; fjftalk@...

Subject: [ ]

Environmental, Agricultural and Occupational Health and Safety Educational

Materials