Fighting for Health Care Equality
As Leclare grew older, gender politics between male doctors and female nurses decreased in the workplace. In the past 20 years, her dedication to the poor in La Crosse, Wis., has ensured quality care for the underserved and ignored. First in 1984, she helped establish the Indochinese Screening Clinic for the thousands of incoming Hmong refugees in the area.
“We would be their first contact for care,” Leclare says. “We’d have them come as a whole family. And then we would go through their records—their rain-soaked records.” Originally functioning in a one-room clinic, Leclare and her team faced challenges navigating the confusion, the interpreters and cultural beliefs that resisted Westernized medicine. “Their belief was that if you enter into the blood stream, the good spirits will come out and you’ll put the bad spirit in. [It was] very difficult,” says Leclare about drawing blood to test for Hepatitis B among the refugees. “But we did it.” Over the next 14 years, she served 4,500 refugees as they began integrating into a healthy life in Wisconsin.
Photo by: Stephanie Wezelman
In 1991, Leclare began to envision a free clinic to address the poor and uninsured in the area. After joining a committee and working with representatives from both hospitals in La Crosse, Leclare became the first director of the Saint Clare Health Mission. “We found out that 10 percent of 100,000 people [in the surrounding counties] would qualify for care in a free clinic,” says Leclare. “To qualify, they have to be 150 percent of the poverty level.” With an identified need, the free clinic prospered thanks to the generosity of over 100 volunteers and countless donations of time and money. Today, more than 350 people volunteer at the Health Mission.
As former President Bill Clinton tried to push health care reform and before President Obama conceived of “Obamacare,” Catholic sisters had been advocating for universal health care and pioneering models based on volunteers and social service for decades. “I feel that health care has to be there for all people…the patient comes first,” reiterates Leclare.
“That Constant Invitation”
Soon after Leclare graduated high school in 1943, she left behind her family farm, one-room schoolhouse and Great Depression-era funk to work in big city Milwaukee. She bought herself a pair of high heels and a red hat with the money she earned, eager to shed the clothing she shared with ten siblings. But her new metropolitan style didn’t surprise her family back in Elroy, Wis., nearly as much as her decision to join a convent.
“You had to write a letter of interest to join. I said to a nun, ‘How about you write it, and I’ll sign it,’” says Leclare. “I knew I wouldn’t actually sit down and write a letter. I was dating at the time and having fun.”
Signed, sealed and delivered shortly after, Leclare decided to give “that constant invitation” to join the convent a test-run. Sixty-eight years later, one would call the test-run a success.
During her second year of novitiate in 1946, her mother superior asked Leclare to become a nurse. Leaving the convent during a nun’s second year was a rarity at the time, but Leclare’s work ethic, intelligence and confidence indicated she could do well.
“It’s kind of like I have nursing in my blood,” says Leclare. As a child, she remembers secretly bandaging her brother’s wounds with leaves after defying her mother and letting him ride on her bike’s handlebars, which somehow led to a dog bite. Later, her mother’s tonsils needed medical attention, and no one told curious Leclare about the operation. “I wanted to be there. I was working up in the barn, and nobody called me. I was so upset.”
So when Leclare received the invitation to go to school for nursing, she immediately agreed, embarking on a lifelong career characterized by change. Through it all, Leclare says, “…working in the nursing field always gave me a feeling of being free.”
