By Somerville Neighborhood News
Contributing reporter Kelly Thomas

Health care is often out of reach to Somerville’s immigrant communities because they don’t know where to go or how the system works. The Cambridge Health Alliance launched the Volunteer Health Advisors or VHA program fourteen years ago to change that.
The VHA is a multicultural and multilingual group of highly trained community health volunteers based out of Somerville Hospital. During each training cycle thirty immigrant scholars spend ten months attending free weekly classes.

“Our goal is to run a volunteer based program that is meant to reach out and serve hardly reached and underserved populations. We like to say that we have 3 C’s that are part of our aim. We are all about Community strengthening, Connection to care and Career and professional development, especially for our volunteer health advisors,” VHA Program Coordinator Chong-Min Fu-Sosnaud told Somerville Neighborhood News.

Volunteers learn to take blood pressure readings, do glucose and cholesterol screenings, calculate body mass index, and bone density. These technical skills aren’t the only benefits they bring back to the community. The volunteers are trained to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate education to their communities.

“The VHA was a really good program for us, to meet new people, and to learn a lot of stuff about communities and communities’ needs. We are the bridge between the Cambridge Health Alliance and our communities. I was volunteering for about 10 years in my Mosque. And I love to volunteer in the VHA program because I love to meet new people, to communicate with people and to help them in different ways,” said Lamia Reem.

Reem moved to the USA from Morocco with her husband and three children. Although she had no previous medical training, she completed the program and is now a volunteer in the VHA program.

“I love everything about this program because it teaches us a lot of things that we can use in our everyday life. Like how to be healthy, and what kind of food you need to eat and what kind of food you shouldn’t eat. And we’ve been trained on doing a lot of tests, like glucose, cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. In our community a lot of people have either high blood pressure or are diabetic so we learned how to give them the risk factors,” said Lamia.

The current group of volunteers comes from twenty different countries and speaks fourteen different languages. The ability to reach community members in their own language and with cultural sensitivities creates sense of trust.

“We try to educate people and we try to connect them to the health care services especially the people who are not insured. And we do it in their language and this one of the unique thing about this program. VHA speak different languages, for example I speak Arabic, that’s my mother tongue, and others speak Portuguese, other speak French. So you can find a variety of volunteers speaking several languages. It’s actually a hyper-diverse community,” said Heba Abolaban, a Syrian refugee and VHA volunteer.
Jesse Branth immigrated from Brazil fourteen years ago and has been volunteering with the VHA for almost that long. For Jesse, the VHA program led to a job as a marketing specialist with the Cambridge Health Alliance. He continues to volunteer for the VHA program even though he’s now working full time.

“To be a volunteer is to be a member of the family, today here it’s very nice to see a lot of people. Everybody together. Because I came from Brazil and I don’t have any family here, so I have a big family now,” said Branth.