Catholic Charities hires bilingual therapist

By RENEE WEBB, Globe editor
July 21, 2005

For some time Catholic Charities in Sioux City has been seeking to hire a Spanish-speaking therapist to serve the growing Latino population in the area but the executive director said he wanted to find the right person.

Jerry Eaton, executive director, said Catholic Charities has found just that in Meg Bessman-Quintero, a native of Hampton in north central Iowa near Mason City.

"People have a right to receive this service in their first language with someone who understands their cultural background," said the bilingual therapist. "This is an important commitment that Catholic Charities made because they are saying that people have a right to heal in the language that is most effective and meaningful for them."

For the first time, Catholic Charities has a full-time bilingual therapist to work with Spanish-speaking clients. Bessman-Quintero also works with English-speaking clients.

Prior to Catholic Charities, Bessman-Quintero worked for 13 years at the Council on Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. She held various positions at the council - program coordinator, community education, supervisor of the shelter, supervisor of non-shelter programming and immigration advocate.

It was through her work at the council where she met Audra Cole, who is the clinical director and a therapist at Catholic Charities. When Bessman-Quintero was looking for a place to do her advanced practicum for her master's in social work via the distance education program through the University of Iowa, she approached Cole about the possibility of working at Catholic Charities.

In August of last year Bessman-Quintero began to work a few part-time hours a week at Catholic Charities to fulfill the requirements of the practicum. Catholic Charities right away saw the value in taking the bilingual therapist on full-time.

Bessman-Quintero describes this as "the God part" of the story. Funding for her position at the council ended and her final day there was Dec. 31 and Catholic Charities took her on Jan. 3 with about 30 hours.

"I think God works those things out. I had loved my work at the council. It was a tremendous place to work," she said. "Philosophically it is similar to this agency (Catholic Charities.) I never believed that I could find an agency that fit so neatly with who I am, but when I started here with my practicum I knew this was a good fit."

On June 1, after Bessman-Quintero had completed her master's and secured her license, she was hired full-time by Catholic Charities.

The notion that it was a good fit was mutual.

"It was very easy to hire her because it is one thing to have the skills but she has the personality and the philosophy that fit into Catholic Charities," said Cole. "She is a faith-filled person with a solid, spiritual base that plays into awareness, dignity and respect of others."

Bessman-Quintero's first work experience with Spanish-speaking didn't happen at the council through her work with immigrants. She did a three-and-a-half year stint in Ecuador working in the Peace Corps from 1986 to 1989.

Although her college major was in psychology rather than Spanish, she had taken Spanish classes for four years in high school and another four years in college at University of Northern Iowa. She was just three hours short to earn a major in Spanish, but she finished with a minor.

"Between my junior and senior years in college, I spent a summer in Mexico City," she said. "I started getting out of the textbook Spanish and into real world Spanish." She lived with a family who didn't speak English, so that was a quick motivator to learn.

By the time she went to Ecuador, her Spanish had improved but she didn't consider herself to be fluent. In both of her experiences in Mexico and Ecuador created an awareness that in different regions of Spanish-speaking languages produced different accents and vocabularies. This awareness has been helpful in her work at Catholic Charities.

"I worked in a little town as a health extentionist - doing health education in schools and vaccination campaigns," said Bessman-Quintero. "I also worked on some community projects like having water installed in the school. There was no water near the school. They had to go to the river to get water."

Just as her experiences gave her an awareness of the differences in the Spanish language even in the same countries, they brought her knowledge of the varied living conditions of people.

While this gave her a sense of compassion in knowing that some people had difficult circumstances, at the same time she discovered that people learn to live with it.

"I learned you wouldn't die if you didn't have running water because people do it all of the time. In the initial stages I was filled with compassion for how people in other parts of the world have to struggle to get daily needs met but that was balanced out by gaining an appreciation and understanding of what true respect is," said Bessman-Quintero. "It's about going into a home where they have very little and they offer you the best that they have. And it's about understanding why you shouldn't refuse it."

Her work in the Peace Corp and other past work experience has given her the capacity to look at the world from a perspective of what she is learning about herself as opposed to what she is learning about other people.

Following the Peace Corp, she moved to Sioux City to work for Lutheran Social Services.

It was another life experience that impacted her decision to go for her master's so that she could work as a therapist. Bessman-Quintero pointed out that she had always wanted to become a therapist and eventually when she was doing work as an interpreter, she witnessed firsthand the need to serve people in their first language.

"I was doing a lot of professional interpreting in the field of social work," she said. "The better your interpreter is, the less connection the client has with the therapist. If the interpreter is good, the client makes the connection with the interpreter and the therapist makes the connection with the interpreter. You have to go through a medium."

This can create problems with confidentiality and the potential for misinterpretations. Because she believes in offering services in people's first language so strongly, she would love to see more competition in town in this area.

But just offering the counseling in a person's first language it not enough, stressed Bessman-Quintero, who went through the RCIA process at Sioux City Cathedral in 2002.

"Even if I were fluent in Spanish, but had no cultural knowledge or didn't have the insight it wouldn't do," she said. Knowing that Latinos may come from very different backgrounds has made her aware that you can't make assumptions, she "must ask - not try to know or figure out my client's perspective."

Any client that walks into her office, Bessman-Quintero stressed, has their own circumstances no matter what language they may speak.

"I think I was meant to learn Spanish," she said. "If that is part of God's plan for you then he will facilitate whatever it is that needs to happen."