A Day at Marana

The clinic director, Peter Mott, asked me to spend a day working at Marana.

“Where’s that?”

“Just a short drive from Tucson.”

Peter was a visionary who recently started a neighborhood health center at the University of Arizona in Tucson and hired me as one of the center’s pediatricians. The center was a demonstration project funded by the Federal government, to say nothing of being a dream come true for the thousands of Chicanos, Yaqui, and Papago Indians living there without medical care.

“Who’s in Marana?” I asked.

“Migrants,” he said. “You’ll have a ball.”

Migrant kids! That sounded great. I was excited.