On a frosty day in February, Dr. Nora Rowley sat on the floor of the mustard-yellow playroom in the Marjorie Kovler Center in Rogers Park helping five-year-old Oscar* push a dump truck around the room. The boy had recently come to the city with his mother from Guatemala, and Rowley asked him what he thought of his new home. Oscar said he didn’t like the wind and winter here.
“My daddy,” Oscar replied. “He hit mommy and me.”
Trained as an emergency room doctor, the 57-year-old has sewn sutures, reset broken bones, and seen all forms of physical trauma. Rowley says that many of the people she’s treated over the years have been tortured by the state and military in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe, and Central America. She has frequently examined patients for criminal evidence collection in cases of rape and abuse. In 2009, during a stint with Doctors Without Borders in Myanmar, Rowley was moved by witnessing torture of Rohingya Muslims and underwent training from Physicians for Human Rights to document the injuries of asylum seekers.
“[She] takes the time to be warm and gets to know them before diving into explaining what she’s going to do,” says Marie Shebeck, a senior case manager at Kovler.
At Kovler, the waiting period depends on the asylum seeker’s deadline for document submission. The center typically has 180 patients per year waiting to be examined. “There are hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, so it is difficult for clinicians to keep up with the demand,” says Kathryn Hampton, a network program officer with Physicians for Human Rights. “Donors do not fund forensic evaluations at the same levels as legal services provision.”
After 90 minutes, the attorney called Rowley and Oscar inside the courtroom. Oscar and his mother had been granted asylum and would be allowed to stay.
