Dream Seed

I was still a young interpreter, recently hired to work at my city's safety-net hospital, when I first became aware of the Mayan people living all around me. Native America hasn't left us - she's living in our midst. 

It was a normal day at the hospital. I was sitting next to the dispatcher in the interpreting office when I overheard her taking in a request for a language called Mam. I studied linguistics in college, and though I was familiar with many languages from around the world, I'd never heard of this one. As I was looking it up on ethnologue, I heard my colleague assign one of the in-person interpreters, a Spanish interpreter, to that request. I looked up, horrified. I asked why she would do that, and was told, with confidence, "Oh, we won't be able to get an interpreter for that language. It's better to send a Spanish interpreter." I stared in incomprehension. The point of an interpreter was for someone to be able to speak to their medical team in their native language - why were we settling for Spanish? 

That day was my introduction to the many indigenous languages that are still spoken today across most of Latin America. In her book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Ingrid Heller talks about the "Territorial Principle," which she defines as "the collective belief that ties a particular abstract language to a particular place and that is enshrined in much linguistic-rights legislation." She is basically saying that we collectively have decided that a place goes with a language, and used that idea to make laws - and it turns out that this is a gross oversimplification. Heller argues that the territorial principle creates "representational" injustice in two ways, one of which is that languages that aren't legislated for are rendered invisible. Which means that when we think of Mexico as "Spanish-speaking," we erase its 64 living (meaning still-spoken) indigenous languages from public awareness. Those 64 languages and their peoples are effectively swept under the global rug.

In the United States we know that the majority language is English (though it's not legally our official national language!) and we also know that in the US there are a large number of Spanish speakers. If we think about it, we might even realize that there are lots of people in the US who speak other languages too (that's the other representational injustice Heller talks about: the territorial principle de-legitimizes language groups that don't have an historical tie to the territory.) But because most of Latin America has been coded as "Spanish-speaking" in our society, we are blind to people (and whole communities!) in our country who come from places like Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru, but are native speakers of pre-colonial languages like Mam, Mixteco, or Quechua - not Spanish. 

This blindness explains why I was completely taken aback by the situation I witnessed that day in the interpreting office. I was language-blind, completely fooled by the territorial principle. Fortunately my colleague was not. She knew that Mam is a language spoken in Guatemala, where Spanish is the official majority language, although its 23 Mayan languages, as well as Garifuna and Xinca were officially recognized in the 1996 peace accords after much internal conflict. So she reasoned that there was a good chance this person might have at least a working knowledge of Spanish, and that sending a Spanish interpreter might lower the language barrier for that person, even if it didn't remove it completely. But why was my colleague so certain we wouldn't be able to even find an interpreter for this person's language? 

Finding the answer to that question, and a strong desire to change the reality that she was right, and that WAS the best we could do that day, sparked a fire in me - the seed of a dream. Over the course of the next few years I would talk to anyone I could find to learn more about the problem and the people who were experiencing it. As I did, the dream took shape. Eventually, I would be joined by others, and together we would found an organization dedicated to this dream.

The dream is this: To try and move the needle on language access in the US for indigenous language speakers from South and Central America. The dream is, in doing so, to lift up these people groups so that they might gain visibility, recognition, jobs, wealth, and self-determination. Over the next few months I hope to narrate my journey so far, to bring you along in my discovery as part of my continued desire to be a microphone for minority voices in majority spaces. Let's. Go.

Poem for a Father

All Grief is swallowed up in Joy.

There's a welcome party on the other side of death

For that boy.

His father's race is almost done,

Run with heart and fire for his son.

His Grief, too, will be swallowed up in Joy,

When the time comes.

For a good father. May you finish your race with hope.

My Daughter is an Angel

"Mi hija es un angel, siempre he dicho que ella es un angel." as I dutifully interpreted, "My daughter is an angel, I've always said she's an angel." I thought to myself, "What? Come on, lady. I know you love your daughter a lot and you're scared of losing her, but an angel?"
I had gone to interpret for her just the previous day, and remembered leaving the encounter thinking about how completely unappealing I found this patient. She grunted more than she talked. When she did, it was loud and sharp and sudden. She was mostly engrossed in her own world, no matter how many people were trying to get her attention - unless she didn't like something or was uncomfortable. Then she'd make that known - loudly. She was 3 times the size of most kids her age, and disfigured by her disease. She reminded me of a puppet character from shows like Dark Crystal. Unkosher as it was, I admitted to myself that I couldn't understand what about her so charmed the rest of the staff, who talked about her with an affectionate kind of indulgence.
So of course I was the one who got the call to go interpret for her parents when her condition worsened to the point of fear. Of course when the Chaplain was about to dismiss me and just sit with the family the patient's mother pointed at me and said, "y tú, no te vayas." - "and you, don't leave." (Only very rarely does a patient recognize me in this way as their communicative link to the medical team and ask me to stay.)
As we sat together, waiting for the medical team to do their work and send us word, the parents and the chaplain started to talk. Gradually, as the parents talked, fear's roots of deep love for their daughter were exposed, and fear gave way to reminiscence and reflection. Which is how I ended up having to say of the same patient that I had judged so harshly that she was an angel. Her mother went on to explain how much she had learned from her daughter: that illness couldn't crush her daughter's determined personality; that doctors are wrong sometimes; that there are so many more medical specialties than she'd ever known existed; that her community's capacity for love was way more than she would have imagined; that her neighbors would defend her daughter instead of judging her; that her daughter's illness and disability would, in fact, bring people together. And it was this last that made her say, in affectionate awe "mi hija es un angel."
And me? I repented. "Okay, God," I thought silently at the creator, "I get it, you win. I'm sorry for judging by appearances. I'm sorry for judging this girl you love and made on purpose."

Spoken Word Poetry

In a book I am reading, a character starts spitting rhymes at an open mic night.
"I'd love to do that," I think,
but then I remember
that words come from feelings
and I'm still pretending
that I don't have any.

I'm fine.
Even though most of the time I'm
locked away in some corner of my mind,
the real me afraid that something is wrong,
something HAS to be wrong,
or I wouldn't feel this way.

But what that is, I'm not trying to find out.
Safer to stay on the lookout
for other ways to occupy my days.
So I stay busy.
But my body rebels, dispels
emotional energy through my cells
making muscles I couldn't isolate if I tried
jump and twitch,
and the fears I tried to hide
come oozing out my skin.
I want to cry.
But when I do I feel terrible.
My neck aches.
Since when do necks ache
when it's your heart that feels fit to break?

But I'm still pretending that I'm fine.
My life, is great.
Sure, my boyfriend's undocumented,
but what does that have to do with it?
I'm straight.

And no, it's not a lotta weight,
at least, I can't tell how much it is.
What part of this comes from lack of papers
and what's his.
'Cause when a body tells you you're not worth the dirt stuck to their shoes,
that shit sticks to you.
And then it shapes you.
And when it comes time to leave and cleave,
I'm sorry, I mean to move yo' ass and prove your love
that shit stops you, 'cause you still feel like an old, used piece of gum glued
to the heel of the government's shoe.
So what do I do? I know he's a good man, who loves me, and I love him, too.

Any maybe this isn't the problem at all.
Maybe the wall I put in place to hide my face from whatever it is I can't trace right now
is hiding something else entirely.
How would I know? I don't wanna look back there,
it's scary. Apparently, I'd rather let the fear become nameless,
and the dread become baseless,
and have all the things I can't control LITERALLY make my skin crawl.

I want to be better. I want to make meaning out of suffering,
clear away the cobwebs of pain and shame
from memories and the life in front of me
and become awake to reality.
To put names to my fears
To use my ears to tell my brain that I can't explain or prepare for everything.
That life hurts. But there's goodness in it too, a sweetness you miss if you
hide from the pain by rushing through.

I want to learn to be okay with not being the best at everything.
Not being the wisest in the room or
the first to solve a problem,
the one who doesn't need to be told.
Because I know that for me, not needing to be those things would mean
that I was being bold.
Letting go of needing control and still feeling safe would mean
- shit, I don't know, probably vulnerability.
Which I'm told is the best way to be awake to BOTH joy AND pain.

I want to let out tears, to let them quiet my fears
enough to be able to tell my soul that I'll be okay without control.
To let myself know that the truth is, I've never HAD control because none of us does.
But what I DO have - in abundance, even - is love.

heartstrings

When I tell people that I work in a children's hospital, they will often say, "oh, that must be easier than working in adults." Generally I'll answer back that actually, for me, it's harder. One of the reasons is that, when your patient is a child, you end up spending most of your time interpreting for their family, so you get up close and personal with the deep love of parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles for their children. That love is intensely strong, and intensely vulnerable, and it can wring you in ways an encounter with an adult patient may not. I was reminded of this recently when I met a young man who required a tracheotomy to breathe, though his mind was perfectly clear.

Some quick background information you may need for this story:

1. A tracheotomy is a hole that a surgeon can make in someone's throat to allow them to breathe without the air going through the person's nose or mouth. It's done if you can't breathe the usual way for some reason.
2. Having a trach generally means you can't talk because in order to speak you need to be able to let air flow over your vocal chords on it's way out of your body - which the air can't do after a tracheotomy because it gets out through the trach before it gets to the vocal chords. 
3. People who get a tracheotomy (trach for short, pronounced "trake") may have a lot of what we call "secretions" - i.e. mucous - but because of the trach, when they cough it up, it can't go all the way up to their throat, where they could swallow it like we all do (gross, I know, sorry) so it has to be manually suctioned out with a special device. So when you see someone with a trach there's often a lot of really gross bodily fluid noises, and fluids.

So I was with this patient and his family, interpreting for his speech therapist, who had brought him a new device to try. This device, though, would allow the boy to inhale through his trach, and exhale through his mouth, which meant he'd be able to speak out loud for the first time since he had the trach placed.

Before letting him try it out, the speech therapist explained to the family (through me in Spanish) and the patient (in English) that putting the device on would change how air was flowing, so it would probably feel uncomfortable at first. She said "it's normal not to be able to tolerate it for long at first, maybe not even a minute; but you can get used to it and work up to being able to leave it on and being able to talk for up to several hours."

So, having set the expectations, she let him try it. There was a lot of spluttering, and he couldn't keep it on for long, but he did manage to start forming one word: "ma-"

The next time he tried it, he managed the whole word: "ma..mi..."

He had so much trouble that time, that the speech therapist asked him to try just humming instead of speaking. He did. It was a pitiful, high-pitched whine, and you could tell from his face that it was intensely uncomfortable. More spluttering and spit, and she took it off.

The next time, she said, don't try to talk or hum - just let me count to 10, and we'll take it off. He did. It was clearly still excruciating.

"Do you want to try again?" she asked. He shook his head no. "Do you want to tell your mom anything before we stop?" He nodded his head yes. She put it on. This time, he held on and managed to say "Mami, te quiero!" before gasping and needing it to be taken off.

I sat in shock for a second, my throat tightening with emotion, before I realized only his mom and I knew what he'd said. "Mommy, I love you!" I repeated, in English, for the speech therapist, respiratory therapist, and the newly arrived psychologist, and was gratified to hear a collective "Aww!!"

When asked if he was willing to try one more time, he refused, and we ended the session there. But it was all I could do not to cry right in the middle of the interpretation. Here was a boy who had spent an unknown amount of time unable to speak, and, without hesitation, the second he got the chance, the first thing he wanted to do - without even stopping to learn how or get comfortable with the new way of using his body - was tell his mother that he loved her. I was awestruck.

It is such a privilege to walk with people in deep suffering, because you see beauty like this. It reminded me of the woman who, upon being told she was likely going to lose her grandchild, began to give thanks for the time she had been able to spend with that child, for the joy of having held that child in her arms the day before. Thanks.

And it is in part for this reason that working in the children's hospital is, for me, harder than working with adults: because you go to those raw places with people who love the people who are suffering. When you work with adults, you have more freedom NOT to put yourself in the shoes of someone who really cares about your patient, because they aren't always there, or, in the interpreter's case, because the patient does most of the talking. When you're working with kids, you don't, because they're right in front of you, doing and feeling and saying all the things loving families and friends do and feel and say. And if you're an interpreter... then whatever they say, you repeat, in English, for everyone else to hear. Their bond with the patient, expressed in their words, passes through you. And it can't not touch you on the way.

don't get bogged down

Today begins with pain. Physical and emotional. Physical because I hurt my shoulder last night, emotional because I learned on arriving to work that yet another of the patients my coworkers and I have served over the course of months and years, has died.

There have been several deaths like that this year, and I was talking to an interpreter friend about how that is an aspect of the job she's not familiar with. Interpreting is a pretty diverse field,  you see, and even one hospital can differ greatly from another. I didn't realize, when I began my journey as an interpreter, that I would be a conduit, not just for people's words, but for their grief and pain; that, in joining a group of professions that work with hurting bodies, I would also find hurting people. It should have come as no surprise to me that when someone's body stops working the way that it should, the person feels unhappy, betrayed, aggrieved, etc. But foolishly, it didn't occur to me. In the same way, it didn't occur to me that when a loved one is ill, or needs medical testing, families feel fear, grief, anger, love, and more... and express those things from the smallest to the most heart-wrenching ways.

I have always been what others call "deep," which in reality just means that I go more easily than most to that conceptual level where ideas and our feelings about them turn out to be inescapably entangled. I can't stand a conversation that's intellectual for the sake of intellect, but when there's passion involved, I'm all in. So I have truly enjoyed, in a way, getting to be with people in the most intimate, emotional processes and decisions that humans go through in life. I count it a privilege. But I wish someone had warned me, because it's starting to become difficult to hold all these stories. My arms are too full, and the thought of holding one more makes me afraid of dropping them, tripping, and falling...

My counselor says this is normal for helping professions. She throws out words like "compassion fatigue" and "PTSD" as things that are common experiences. Me, I remember a very smart PR lady I once worked with who said, "it takes six positive experiences to balance out one negative experience." For her, the point was customer service. For me, it means I need to start very intentionally keeping a list of the good things I see. Flecks of light, joy, hope, peace. Because the bad weighs more than the good, those good things tend to fly away on the wind that disappears memories. But if I list them, maybe my day will look more like mica-flecked rock: dark in color, but sparkling when you turn it over in the light.

***
Obviously, there are more ways to practice self-care than making lists of the good things in a day. That has proved a useful tool for me in the past, so as these weeks have been extra difficult, I'm going to pick it up again. But exercise, vacations, and projects where I have control have also proved very helpful. One of the hardest things about interpreting, for me, is that I have so very little control over anything: where I interpret, for whom, for how long, in what type of situation, when I get a break; even to a certain extent whether or not I interpret for someone who, in my professional opinion, needs it or could benefit from it. So another thing that helps me is finding professional projects to work on where I do have control, which for me ends up being teaching and developing continuing education for interpreters.

If you are an interpreter too, I hope that this post helps you. What we do isn't just a workout for the mind, it's hard on the heart as well. I hope this post encourages you to find ways of keeping yourself in balance.

sometimes...

I sat in the hospital chapel, head in my hands, trying to pray but slipping into sleep instead. My phone rang. It was the dispatcher, who wanted me to rush right back to the side of the child I'd just left, in the outpatient clinic. He'd taken a turn for the worse, and the clinic had called rapid response.
My bowed head just earlier had been for him. Sometimes, you just know.

I rushed back toward the elevator. Would it be faster to take the elevator? I tried, but after 15 seconds, decided I'd better just rush up the stairs. Even though I've never said my own words to them, even though this family knows next to nothing about me, I've spent hours of months repeating their words, and have a deep affection for them. I thought of the child's mother, listening and watching without knowing or understanding, and took the stairs two at a time. Sometimes, someone else's emergency is yours, too.