2.3 Immigrants in a municipality near madrid: the teaching of  (Page 7/9)

In the initial stages of the immigration process, the labor situation is more precarious and unstable, placing economic gain over one’s health. The immigrant’s struggle of daily survival is invisible to many members of Spanish society. If we are to accept the ideal of assuming multicultural models where we all fit, we should not only know the immigrants’ customs, but also the social reality in which they are living.

Insufficient nutrition is a reality to the immigrants with a short time of stay in our country. When they reach stability in the labor and economic aspects, they begin to reach stability in their diets. An essential way to maintain their identity, which is always put at risk during the emigration process, is the material and symbolic adherence to the traditional meals of the country of origin, the cuisine of one’s childhood and traditions.

Health education for immigrants

The health education to immigrants, more than to any other group, will have to be bidirectional and interactive. The campaigns of health education with unidirectional messages or written pamphlets, which are the mere translation of the original message in Spanish to their language, without considering the social, cultural, and economic characteristics, will lead to failure. Pretending to “educate” on correct dieting cannot be done if the perspective of people living in a precarious economic situation is left aside. To imagine that the doling out of health advice will modify their practices shows nothing but ignorance on the part of health professionals. More than ignorance, it also shows arrogance by conceiving our practices as more developed and cultured.

When we give health-related messages we must remember they are not neutral, although we believe so. They contain ideological and cultural content about ways of being or perceiving the world. In order to interact with people of other cultures we must know their cultural values and place ourselves in situations having previously reflected: Are we trying to make them believe in us blindly? Can this situation be transplanted to their experience? Let us not try to pretend that our lives and professional experiences are universally logical.

To understand the background of this topic will help us understand a subject that sometimes is observed by health professionals with too much passion and little rationality: immigrants’ health. If we ignored all of the circumstances of the immigrant’s life, our professional activities could lead us to frustration. That feeling of frustration is sometimes visible in health-related workers in their attitudes towards immigrants, whom health-care professionals blame, saying: “they just do not do what they are supposed to;” “they do not listen to us;” “they do what they want.” For a health-care worker to place blame on the immigrants is a more comfortable position when failure to modify practices is apparent, but if we all opted on comfort, our species would have been extinguished millions of years ago.