The language barrier.
As someone who deals with a language barrier on a regular basis, I can attest to how frustrating, irritating, and isolating those walls can be. My parents’ English are conversational at best and my Chinese is the same status. That makes for very brief and rudimentary conversations concerning ordinary, typical, everyday activities. Not being able to share the depth of my thoughts and emotions with my parents makes me sad. As an only child, my mother and father are my key links between everything that’s kicking around in my head, and the external environment.
As I fumble and bullshit my way through conversations in Swahili, I am reminded of this language barrier that I have with my parents. The barrier between me and the people here in Tanzania is much worse. Other than the greetings and a couple random gems like “how old are you?” and “This costs too much, please lower the price,” I can only stare silently at the nice person who’s trying to form a connection with me and smile politely. In the clinic, the frustration is even worse because there are usually important things that I want desperately to convey to the patient. However, the combination of time constraints and the language barrier makes it impossible for me to say everything that I want to say. Near the beginning of my time at the clinic, the sparse patient histories bothered me tremendously. Now, I have learned to pick my battles. Due to these constraints of time and language, I am pressured to select only the most high-yield questions and to phrase them in a manner that is both conducive to translation and the patient being able to understand the question.
While I struggle on my end with the language, it is important to realize that the patient is struggling as well. I can only imagine how intimidating it is for the patient to sit there, watching a couple foreign doctors go back and forth in another language, occasionally glancing in the patient’s direction. All those scary thoughts that run through the patient’s mind as his own medical condition is being talked about in a manner that the he cannot understand. Medicine is one field where the consequences of language barriers should be taken seriously.
As another long day in the clinic comes to an end, I find myself in a similar predicament as I meet a couple local friends in town for drinks. We sit around a table trying to piece together fragments of broken English and Swahili into coherent constructs only to watch the whole thing turn into another big misunderstanding in the end. At that point, I was tired and was satisfied with sitting back, smiling, and nodding occasionally. While I watched my companions, I realized that while I did not understand 96% of the things they said, I still knew in my bones that these were cool people that I could get along with.
The words were lacking, but the handshakes, hugs, smiles were plentiful. The feeling of a baby bouncing on your lap, high-fiving a young patient for being free of malaria, squeezing a concerned mother’s hand as she watches the ultrasound monitor nervously. As important as verbal communication may be, it will never come close to replacing the warm, loving nature of physical, human contact.
