Avera connects with African immigrants through community outreach consultants

By KATHLEEN NELSON

Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is one of the nation’s fastest growing immigrant gateway cities, ranking on the U.S. Census Bureau’s top 10 list in 2019 for immigrant population growth in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

The largest group of immigrants hails from Ethiopia. African immigrants make up the biggest foreign-born cohort in Sioux Falls, followed by immigrants from Mexico, Liberia, Guatemala and Nepal.

Many immigrants and refugees are employed in the meatpacking industry, where English fluency may not be required to perform manual labor jobs. But language skills are important when foreigners attempt to access and negotiate the U.S. health system.

In Sioux Falls, Avera Health’s Adane Redda and Moses Idris are community outreach consultants helping bridge the language and cultural chasm that can keep foreign-born patients from getting essential health care and social services.

Both Redda and Idris were resettled in the U.S. as African refugees. Redda, 73, arrived in Sioux Falls in 1999, having left his native Ethiopia because of political unrest and spending five years in a refugee camp in Kenya.

Idris, 28, arrived in 2010 at age 15 after