A video produced in Galveston, Texas that documents the stories of struggle after Hurricane Ike.

Introductory comments from the Hear Our Voice video screening:

Good Evening and thank you all for coming this evening! I want to offer my sincere thanks to you all for coming to Hear our Voice-mine, yours, and that of your fellow community members. My name is Rebecca Hester and I am an Assistant Professor in the Institute for the Medical at UTMB.

We are here tonight to amplify the voices and illuminate the circumstances of the socially vulnerable in Galveston and to invite you into what we hope will be the beginning of a community-driven conversation on the issues presented in the film. Before I describe the program, I have a list of people and organizations to thank for their contributions to this event. First, I would like to thank the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund. Without their generous support, none of this would have been possible. We are very grateful for their financial support.

1. Second, I would like to thank the co-organizers of this event, Dr. Jason Glenn, my colleague at the Institute, and Ana Diaz-Vizarreta, our volunteer who has selflessly given to this project for close to a year without expectation of compensation or recognition. Third on my list are Michael Jackson and A.J. Halvorsen. Without them this project would never have been conceptualized. Michael came up with the idea that the voices of the most marginalized and vulnerable in Galveston needed to be heard in the board rooms, the city council chambers, and any other venue where decisions are being made without their presence and input. He suggested making a video that would allow us to hear those voices. AJ, a nurse and former employee at St. Vincent’s, approached me with worries that patients at St. Vincent’s would struggle to pay for services if the clinic became a federally qualified health center and started charging for services. We took their concerns, designed a survey, conducted interviews, and developed the video which you will see tonight and about which I will say more shortly.
2. Next on the list, I would like to thank all of my colleagues and students, at UTMB, as well as the staff members who have contributed in one way or another to this project. They are Lexi Nolen, Jerome Crowder, Howard Brody, Arlene Macdonald, Kate Fiandt, Rachel Pearson, Randy Horton, Janese Laster, Shannon Guillot-Wright, Marisela Sifuentes, Jennie Gounah, Donna Vickers, Beverly Claussen, and especially Erica Fletcher for her untiring dedication to and hard work on the film. She is one of the co-producers of the film, although her name was inadvertently omitted from the version will you see tonight. The Center to Eliminate Health Disparities and the Institute for the Medical Humanities deserve special recognition for their support of this project. Ryan Miniot also deserves our gratitude for the hours he spent transcribing interviews.
3. I would also like to thank all of the staff at St. Vincent’s House and the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hope Clinic for their time and their courage in sharing their perspectives with us. From the Salvation Army I would like to give a special thanks to Steven Huggins, and to thank Captain Mark Jacobs, Kim Lerma, and Major Harvey. I want to extend a warm thank you to staff members from the Jesse Tree and the Luke Society. I would also like to thank all of the people who agreed to be interviewed, both on the record and off, for this project. Certainly without their willingness to share their views this entire endeavor would not have been possible. Finally, I want to thank Old Central Cultural Center for hosting us and La Michoacana and Leon’s Barbeque for providing us this meal tonight and to Paulita Coronado for keeping us fed all the time.
4. As I already explained, this project was born out of a request that came from community members to incorporate more voices into the changing dynamics in Galveston after Hurricane Ike. The kind of research I do is called community-based participatory research which means that I work closely with community members to identify and meet their research needs. The majority of the research projects I undertake are driven by the concerns in the community and the way that I go about understanding these concerns is to work in close collaboration with whatever community member or organization has asked for my help. My method is ethnographic, which means that I listen to people’s stories, participate in their events, and observe the dynamics they are a part of in order to get a complex and complete picture of their lives. At the same time, I do research on the history and politics of the context in which they live in order to contextualize the stories I hear. I tell you this so that you know how to understand what is presented here tonight. Ethnographic research complements statistical research by putting faces and emotions to percentages and pie charts. Given this, there are few “hard” numbers, but a lot of real humanity on offer this evening.
5. In the video you will see real emotion and hear compelling stories, you will also hear frontline workers from the Jesse Tree, the Salvation Army, and The St. Vincent’s Hope Clinic sharing their views on Galveston. As you’ll see, the film, which is not by any means a slick or professional production but more of a community collage, traffics back and forth between the voices of social service providers who offer a contextual analysis of what is going on in Galveston and the voices of Galveston residents who share their perspectives and stories. Some of the people interviewed here are both social service providers and socially vulnerable. Galveston has a lot of working poor and, for anyone that has ever worked in a social service job, we know that they don’t pay well and often don’t offer health insurance so even those who are paid to help the poor find themselves in the same predicament as those they help. The film, like the emotions of some of the people conveyed in it, is a raw illustration of people’s concerns from their individual perspectives. It is meant to be a background piece for the panel discussion that will follow it. It is my sincere hope that both the film and the panelists will provoke ideas and responses from the audience and that people will feel compelled by what they hear to share their own stories here tonight and in the future.
6. There is a short summary of findings from this project that we have printed and made available for you in the back of the room. Next to the summary you will find an article written by one of our graduate students at the Institute for the Medical Humanities who is also a medical student at UTMB. I invite you to read these documents as they provide increased context for this event. Specifically, the paper calls attention to the prevalent idea in the U.S. society today that some poor people, like widows and children, are not poor by choice and are therefore deserving of a hand-up from their fellow citizens. By contrast, others groups such as poor single mothers, drug addicts, and the homeless, are stereotyped as having chosen their life and lifestyle and are, consequently, held to be undeserving of support, compassion, and respect from society. The article, which was published in the Texas Observer yesterday, discusses what its author, Rachel Pearson, calls Texas’ other death penalty. By the “other” death penalty she means the way that we relegate people to death, effectively killing them, by failing to provide early and adequate access to health care. It is a poignant and heart-wrenching discussion of how medical care for the poor is not one of the “wonders” that is currently being worked at UTMB despite the efforts of dedicated and concerned physicians and medical students like Rachel.
7. These documents, like this event, are meant to remind ourselves that we are all human beings and, in the words of many of our interviewees, all God’s children. We struggle, we suffer, we get sick, bad things happen to us that are out of our control, and we all want something more and better for ourselves when those bad do things happen. We are hopeful until all hope has been extinguished in us. Hope is often fueled by the actions of others toward us and its extinction is also driven by the dehumanizing ways that we are treated by others.
8. If you take nothing else away from this evening, it is my hope that you will take this reminder, a reminder which is also a call to act, whether in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of humanity, or out of pure self-interest (because the research shows that all boats are lifted when there is equality in society), to alleviate the suffering of those human beings around you. One way to start this process is by hearing their voice.