Not eligible for Medicare or other assistance, he said they often had to set aside their pride and plead for reduced medical fees -- until they started visiting the clinic.
"This is a blessing for us. Before, we were at the mercy of doctors," said Chowdhury after getting his blood pressure checked. "Here, it's much more dignified."
Abdul Karim Chowdhury, 89, and wife Zahida Banoo, 75, who moved to Maryland from Bangladesh, leave the Silver Spring clinic after receiving care.
(Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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In many conservative Islamic societies, women are expected to be modest, baring little even in front of a doctor. Male physicians often are rejected by the women, and husbands routinely accompany their wives into examination rooms.
At the clinic, a female doctor is always available. On this day, it's Ayesha Jafry, a family physician whose day job is at Johns Hopkins University. She checks women for breast masses, high blood pressure, diabetes. She often soothes her patients in Urdu.
Jafry said she is careful not to discuss fertility problems in front of husbands, given the huge importance placed on having children in most Islamic societies.
"There are some things you can and cannot say in front of a spouse," she said.
Members of the community center, all of whom are Sunni Muslims, contribute a percentage of their income and assets, usually 2.5 percent, to a zakat fund. In Islam, zakat means both "purification" and "growth."
A portion of the money pays for the clinic's medicine and equipment, and for any treatment that cannot be provided there. The staff of 10 doctors and medical students, many of them also members of the center, donates time. Labs and specialists in the region provide services at steep discounts. Montgomery County officials recently gave the clinic a $20,000 grant. Montgomery spends $2.1 million annually to provide primary care to uninsured adults.
The clinic, which operates Fridays and Sundays, sees as many as 80 patients a week. It is open to anyone uninsured, though it largely attracts Muslim immigrants from South Asia and Africa -- mostly uninsured adults, who are the group most in need. In this region, children and pregnant women have access to public health benefits, regardless of their immigration status.
The goal is to diagnose and treat ailments before they require more expensive care. Take the 65-year-old Nigerian woman who ran out of her medication to treat her glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness. For two weeks, she tried to do without the medication. Then, the headaches came, and her sight waned.
The clinic gave her $500 from the zakat fund for medication and an ophthalmologist.
"She couldn't believe it," Qadri recalled.
Obstacles to Care
Corraya, Chowdhury and Banoo are legal U.S. residents, but many of the 450,000 uninsured immigrants in the area are here illegally, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which calculated the statistic through an analysis of recent census data.
Illegal immigrants have long faced obstacles to health care. In 1996, even legal newcomers began to encounter problems. Congress passed legislation that barred immigrants from Medicaid and child health insurance during their first five years in the United States.
