Armando Vazquez
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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
The internationally accepted definition of a pandemic as it appears in the Dictionary of Epidemiology is straightforward and well-known: ‘an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people’. [1]
We have that kind of epidemic/pandemic health problem in the greater Oxnard Latino community, and it is getting bigger and more deadly every year. What is horrific and tragic about this health crisis is that it is almost totally preventable. The preventable health issues associated with this epidemic in our Latino community, to note some of the glaring and obvious are; obesity, high blood pressure, various forms of diabetes, hypertension, some heart ailments, and the myriad of both physiological and psychological collateral health damage, issues and problems caused by our collective poor health. Our health epidemic then is to a large degree a matter of ignorance (both willful and benign), very limited community health outreach and education and; finally plain and simple our own terrible choice about what we do to our bodies and our minds in the course of living out our short existence here on earth!
Father Boyle of Homeboy Industries always pops up in my mind when I write social commentary and his reminder that complex social problems require equally complex, well planned and long term interventions ring exceedingly true here. It has taken a long time for our community to be in such bad collective health, but here we are. So what do we do to turn this community health crisis around?
In the after school KEYS Leadership Academy conducted out of the Café on A we would invariably be greeted by our students armed with a soft drink or (other junk food and drinks). Once in a blue moon a kid would come in with and apple or an orange in her/his hands. We decided to incorporate a healthy living and nutrition module to our regular programming. We reached out to community health partners and began a healthy snack program couple with timely and relevant youth health related topics.
We discovered that few our of our KEYS youth did any kind of regular exercise and astonishing 97% of our kids could not swim, and the magnificent Pacific shore line just a few miles away. We began the ACCESS Water Oxnard program about 5 years ago and today we have provide Red Cross certified swim lesson to over 1500 youth, children and their parents in this short time span. Our short term goal is to get all of our novice swimmers into the nearby beaches to enjoy one of the most magnificent coastlines in the world, and it is here in Oxnard. Before that can happen on a large scale we need to prepare and train a Junior Life Guard Brigade of Oxnard, so that we are staffing our life guard needs with local home grown youth and adults. Our long term goal is to have certified swim lessons provide to all Oxnard youth free of charge, our goal is simple get every youth and parent to become a safe and proficient swimmer.
Around the same time we began our ACCESS Water Oxnard swim program we decided to start a dance exercise program for farm and factory working women and other women that for whatever reason(s) did not or could not exercise regularly. We started the One Love Zumbaile Exercise Program at the Café on A, and now we have hundreds of woman their children (very few men) taking advantage of this great exercise dance program. The women love the exercise program and the results are astonishing, before our eyes bodies and minds are being transformed.
After the dance exercise classes we noted that the women would talk and share nutrition, receipts and other health related ideas. So we began the Salseras Project, formalizing the group talk and getting the woman to formally share receipts, oral histories and personal concerns and issues that they felt they could share with the new found Salsera sisters. This is a slow and meticulous process, but the Salseras are talking, laughing and sharing and out of this sisterhood we will self publish a Las Salseras Salsa receipt book in the summer of 2015. The woman will share their favorite salsa receipts and we will have a chance to talk and share fresh, healthy, nutritional and tasty salsa from all over Latin America presented to community of Oxnard by Las Salseras.
In order to make a real impact on the health of our community we must work together as a community to create a Healthy Lives philosophy that governs our lives. It truly takes the entire village to keep all of our brothers and sister thinking, talking and acting on healthy life choices. So we at the KEYS Leadership Academy at the Café on A would like to acknowledge our greater community partners, Clinicas Del Camino Real, Kaiser Permanente, Laborers Union 585, Plaza Development Corporation, City Of Oxnard, John Flynn Foundation, LULAC, Oxnard College, CSUCI, OHSD, and all of the youth and their parents that are doing the hard work of personal and community healthy living stewardship in the greater Oxnard area.
[1] Last J. A dictionary of epidemiology (4th Edition) Oxford University Press 2001.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.
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