Latino Baby-Sitters Taught About Safety : Course Covers Differences in Cultural Reactions to Emergencies

Like many Southern Californians, Ismelda Durazo was jolted by the 1987 Whittier earthquake. But that was nothing, she said, compared to the jolt she received when she saw her Guatemalan baby-sitter’s reaction to it.

“I was upstairs with my son when the quake hit, and my baby-sitter was downstairs with my daughter. I yelled for her to get under a table, but she still ran outside with my daughter,” Durazo recalled.

“When I asked her later why she didn’t listen to me, she told me it was what she had been taught to do. She said, ‘In my country, you run outside during earthquakes, because if you don’t, the house will fall on top of you.’ ”

From that experience, Durazo began to wonder if there might be other cultural differences that could affect her baby-sitter’s response to emergencies. The conclusion she reached, she said, was not a comforting one.

“My baby-sitter is very bright,” Durazo said, “but when she told me how people in her country treat things like burns and fevers, that’s when it hit me that my children were at risk.

“Our beliefs here are so different than in the Latin American countries. Still, no one was addressing it.”

Convinced that there was an information gap that needed filling, Durazo left her job as an insurance company clerk in 1987 and founded Safekids, U.S.A., a one-day course designed for Latino housekeepers.

Conducted in Spanish, the six-hour class addresses topics such as infant cardiopulmonary resuscitation, treating shock, accidental poisoning and kidnaping awareness. At the completion of the class, each participant receives American Red Cross certification in CPR from Durazo, who is a certified instructor.

The American Red Cross itself holds a CPR class in Spanish in downtown Los Angeles that costs $15. A Red Cross spokeswoman, however, said that the Red Cross course does not address all the other safety issues covered in Durazo’s class.

Since Durazo first offered her class, several hundred housekeepers have taken the course at sites in Encino, West Hills, West Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach, she said. She plans to expand to Pasadena, Malibu and Newport Beach, she said.

Although many of the misconceptions she confronts are held by people everywhere, Durazo begins each class by confronting the ones she encounters most often among women from Latin American countries. For housekeepers who are working in the United States illegally, that often means dispelling a mistaken belief regarding the consequences of dialing 911.

After one Salvadoran housekeeper attended a class held recently in West Hills, she said in Spanish, “Before, I would have been afraid that if I called someone in an emergency, immigration would come.”

Only two of the 11 women in the class said they were legal residents.

Durazo, whose parents are from Mexico and who speaks fluent Spanish, said, “You wouldn’t believe how many women have said to me, ‘Oh yes, I have heard of 911. The lady told me to call 911 in an emergency.’ But when I asked them what 911 is, they have absolutely no idea. The term 911 means nothing to them.”

In most cases, Durazo said, housekeepers sign up for the $50 class at the request of employers, who view the cost as an investment in precaution. “One mother just wrote and said her housekeeper came back and wanted to know where the flashlights and gas shutoff valve were in case of an earthquake,” she said.

Lesley Salisbury Thompson, a Los Angeles feature writer for British publications, said she heard about the class from two neighbors who planned to enroll their housekeepers.

“One of the reasons I wanted her to take the class in Spanish was that I think there is a reluctance for many Hispanic women to admit they don’t always understand you,” Thompson said. “We all have pools that pose a safety problem, and the housekeepers spend a lot of time with the children, and so there really is the need for basic information.”

Lorena Gonzales, a housekeeper from Mexico, said her employer had an even stronger personal reason for asking her to take the class.

“She asked me what I would do if her infant were choking, and I told her I once pulled food from the throat of a little boy. She said, ‘That was good, but in most cases it wouldn’t help,’ ” Gonzales said. “Then she told me that when she was a child, on Christmas, her 1 1/2-year-old brother choked on food and died.”

“If my mother had known the Heimlich maneuver, he might still be alive today,” said Christian Gilbert, a civil engineer in Glendale who hired Gonzales to care for her 3-month-old daughter.

For Sharon Piehl, a banking administrator who lives in Pacific Palisades, enrolling her housekeeper in the class represented an attempt to deal with the after-effects of tragedy.

Piehl was at home last March when a fire broke out in her neighbor’s house across the street and claimed the lives of three children who had been left in the care of a Spanish-speaking baby-sitter.

The baby-sitter, who inadvertently caused a fire by draping a cloth over a lamp to help one child sleep, ran outside screaming for help. By the time she and some neighbors tried to enter the house to get the children, the home was engulfed in flames.

“Everyone was so traumatized by this, including all of the housekeepers, we had to do something,” said Piehl, who organized a group of 11 housekeepers in the neighborhood to take the Safekids course. “When I talked to my baby-sitter the next day, I told her that if anything like that ever happened, everything was replaceable except the children. This other baby-sitter thought she had time to go back for the children.

“I was told that in Mexico, many of the buildings are made of brick, and so if there is a fire, it doesn’t burn the same way,” Piehl said. “They wouldn’t think a house could burn down so fast.”

Today, Piehl said, she takes no chances when it comes to the children’s safety.

“I have emergency numbers hanging right next to the phone, along with my address,” she said. “My baby-sitter may know where I live now, but not know” the address “if there were a crisis.”

Durazo, who teaches the course to about 40 women each month, said she believes that kind of awareness could well be used by many other parents. Although she said it is not uncommon for housekeepers to be unable to give the last name or address of their employers--at a recent class, for example, nine out of 11 women did not know their employers’ last name--that lack of information also works both ways.

“Sometimes I’m really shocked by the things the mothers tell me,” Durazo said. “I ask them about their housekeepers, and they don’t even know their last names or where they live. God forbid they should hire a nut, and she should take off with their children.”

Durazo said she recommends that employers ask for at least three references from potential housekeepers and that, once hired, the employers make a photocopy of a current form of picture identification.

In classes, Durazo also makes an effort to determine which housekeepers have been informed about what to do in an emergency, and which ones have been told nothing.

“I ask how many of them have been given a first-aid kit, and maybe two people will raise their hands,” she said. “Even then, no one has explained to them what it is for.

“What that means to me,” she said, “is that even if they have it, they don’t know how to use it.”

For more information on the next Safekids classes , call (818) 884-7311.