A few weeks ago Betsy asked if I would teach her how to make a dish that I had made for her before and she had really enjoyed. I readily agreed and we had a fun time hanging out and cooking. It was during our cooking adventure that Betsy told me about her "UB" project. The "UB" is short for "Ultimate Betsy" and apparently what the UB project entails is envisioning the person you want to be and then taking concerted steps towards becoming that person. For example, Betsy informed me that the UB goes to yoga several times a week and runs several times a week. In addition, the UB is a cooks good healthy meals, and does countless other admirable activities. Betsy explained that the cooking lesson was her taking steps towards becoming the UB.
A picture of Betsy and Melissa on Melissa's graduation day. Betsy is on the left.
Several weeks ago I started my Family Medicine rotation at an amazing location. It is a community clinic and serves a wide variety of underserved, uninsured, and minority patients. I had been excited about doing my rotation there for months. On my first day in the clinic I discovered a huge portion of the patient population at the clinic speaks Spanish. There is a Spanish interpreter on site everyday. However, most of the providers speak Spanish very well and are able to communicate quite well without a need for the interpreter. I speak almost no Spanish, and at the end of my first day I in the clinic I had never wanted to speak Spanish so desperately in my entire life.
So of you may be a little puzzled as to why, if I want to work internationally and with under served populations, why I to this point speak almost no Spanish. It is a long story. However, it begins in my stubborn (and slightly rebellious) teenage years. Being home schooled, you are sometimes frustratingly limited to learning what one of your parents knows or what you are able to teach yourself from a book. My mom took Spanish in Junior High school, and explained that this was my high school foreign language learning option. I had spent a week in Honduras, and saw the value of learning Spanish as a second language. However, when I first stated that I wanted spend a significant part of my life overseas working with underserved populations and that I felt particularly drawn to sub-Saharan Africa, no less than 5 people came up to me and said something to the effect of, "Africa is so far away. You should just learn Spanish and work in Central and South America. Then you would be closer to the US and could come back more frequently." It happened so frequently, that it really started to get on my nerves. Being a generally non-confrontational person, instead of being angry or arguing, I just smiled and gave a non-committal response and then quietly vowed to myself never to learn another word of Spanish.
(I have just realized the next paragraph is completely unnecessary to the point of this blog entry, so please feel free to just skip it. Sorry for all the extraneous words. If I was a good writer and considerate to my blog readers, I would just delete the next paragraph, but I am neither of those things and it was a lot of work to type up the paragraph, so I am leaving it in).
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Thus my language learning journey began. I quickly discovered that I loved learning new languages and particularly I enjoyed learning about different cultures through the conduit of the language. When our family adopted the my two brothers from Russia, my mom and I borrowed the Learnables tapes from a friend, and together we learned ~500-1,000 words in Russian. Mostly just nouns and verbs, we didn't learn grammar or how to conjugate anything, but it made it easier once the boys arrived with their non-existent English skills. Years, later I have forgotten most of the Russian I learned, but if passe people speaking Russian on the street I can still pick out the occasional word. After our family encounter with Russian, I started off during my home school years teaching myself a little American Sign Language. I was particularly interested in this as my adopted sister, Rachel, had difficulty speaking but found signing much easier. When I started college at 16, I signed up for a couple ASL classes and loved them. After this experience, I decided to start working on some of the languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. Before my last year at Skagit Valley College, I discovered an Intensive Swahili course at the UW and took it over the summer as a non-matriculating UW student. I loved the course and found Swahili to be a particularly fun language to learn. During my last year at the UW I was accepted to the Tulane University International Health and Development MPH program which required proficiency in a foreign language for graduation . I was fairly troubled - which language should I choose? They said ASL didn't qualify. I could not find any resources to continue my studies of Swahili to the level of proficiency and Russian probably wouldn't help me that much with my work in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, I decided to start learning a mainstream language spoken in Africa with lots of resources available to assist me in gaining proficiency - French. I signed up for another summer intensive language course at the UW (an entire year of the language in 1 summer) even though I had already graduated. This course was an excellent experience for me, mostly because I got to experience what it was like to be the "dumb kid" in the class. It became apparent that I had absolutely no aptitude for learning French what so ever. The only phrase I truly learned how to say well was, "Je ne comprends pas!" ("I don't understand!") As I endured the impatient looks of pity from other members of the class who seemed to be able to grasp the fundamentals of speaking French easily. Even though my French learning experience was pretty much an abysmal failure, I still hoped to continue learning french in New Orleans during my MPH studies. However, as many of you know (because I still complain about this to anyone who will listen), I carefully packed up all of my French books, French CDs, and my other most precious books, into a box (that weight 39 pounds) and mailed it to my new address in New Orleans via "media mail" without insurance on August 15th, 2005. Shortly after arriving in New Orleans, I had to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina and ended up spending a semester at a University in Texas. After returning to New Orleans in Jan of 2006, I went to the post office to inquire about my box of books twice, but the post-office employee just gestured to dumpsters of moldy packages and said that since I hadn't insured the box there was nothing they could do. On top of the loss of my language learning resources. All the French tutoring/learning places went out of business. I took my innate inability to learn French, loss of all my books, and closing of all French language programs in New Orleans as signs from God that I should not become proficient at French at that time. I was planning on going to Uganda for a number of months for my capstone project for my MPH anyway. When I was accepted to medical school, it turned out that I had some extra time to be able to go to Tanzania to an intensive language school for 2 months and work on my Swahili again. I ended fulfilling my language proficiency requirement for my MPH in Swahili, so it ended up working out well in the end anyway.
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Anyway, back to my first day in clinic and regretting my decisions that led me to have no knowledge of Spanish, even though it is arguably the most useful language a health care provider working with underserved populations in the United Sates could speak. I couldn't believe my teenage self was so stupid to not have learned Spanish and I thought to myself that this point in my life, I would pay money to be able to speak Spanish. Mid-way through wallowing in my self-pity, I thought about Betsy and her "UB" concept. I wondered if there was an "Ultimate Christine", what would she do? I came to the conclusion that the "UC" does many things the current Christy does not do. However, one thing the UC does do, is make an effort to learn the language of her current patient population no matter where she is working. I drove to the bookstore that night and purchased some Spanish language learning tapes and started listening to them daily. I was surprised that although the French language by definition hates me, many of the words in Spanish sound vaguely familiar because of my study of French years ago.
I have now try to utilize by fledgling Spanish with my interactions with patients in clinic. This has has resulted in some awkward situations. Several times I tried using the word "Encatada" several times in clinic to mean "nice to meet you" as instructed by the Spanish learning tapes. After getting some strange looks I decided to ask the interpreter how to say "nice to meet you." Apparently, in clinic, the best way to say this is "Mucho Gusto." The interpreter informed me that saying 'encantada' to a patient is super creepy (apparently it is more appropriate for if you wanted to impress or seduce a man/woman at a formal dinner party) and that I should no longer say this. Good times. What is a visit to the doctor without the clueless medical student saying something creepy to you?
What the "Ultimate Christine" does - working towards learning the language of her current patient population.
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