Thursday, September 13, 2012

Voces establishes itself in Battle Creek Latino community

The memory still makes Kate Flores shudder.

She recounts the story of a local Latino woman who was in the midst of a miscarriage, could not speak English and had no way to make herself understood at the hospital because there was no interpreter.

So instead, she relied on her English-speaking 13-year-old son in the emergency room, the only person she trusted to make herself understood to doctors.

“Can you imagine?” said Flores, executive director of Voces, a nonprofit organization seeking to provide assistance to Latinos in the Battle Creek area.

It’s that story, and others too much like it, that convinced Flores and others concerned about the local Spanish-speaking community to get behind Voces, Spanish for “voices.”

http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20120913/NEWS01/309130001/Voces-establishes-itself-B-C-Latino-community