On Learning to Fail

 

Turns out working as a medical interpreter is rather hard.  And by rather, I actually mean really, really, really.  This past Wednesday was my first attempt to step into that role, and boy did I flounder!  My task was 1) to get a refugee family to the hospital on time for their 6:30 am appointment and then 2) serve as an interpreter for the outpatient operation that one of the family members required.  And folks, truth be told, I utterly failed on both counts!

We wound up making it to the hospital a whopping thirty minutes late for the appointment, a thing that was more than a little bit frowned upon by the operating staff.  My arrival at the family’s apartment had inadvertently functioned as their wake up call, so we left later than intended, and then, once there, I got us 100% lost within the compound of medical buildings and hospitals, which resulted in us circling the whole place (in the cold.  and the dark.) for what felt like eons before finally racing up to our destination.  Once there, after butchering the translation of several medical/ legal documents with the father (explaining things like an Advance Directive to a refugee family in French is most likely beyond me at any time, much less that early in the morning!), I realized that I had yet to hear a response back from the young daughter, the family member who was actually having the operation.  Shyness, perhaps, or nervousness about the upcoming procedure, I wondered?  Or, worse, had she for whatever reason taken an instant disliking to me, or found my French so terrible as to not be deserving of a reply?  After repeated attempts to get through to her continued to fail, suddenly it hit me—she really was not understanding me because she does not speak French!  When I finally made this breakthrough and point-blank asked the father what languages his daughter speaks, he offered that, yes, she only speaks Swahili.  Now, considering that my knowledge of Swahili extends no further than “Jambo,” well, my role as interpreter was becoming more complicated by the minute!

So there we were: me translating for the doctor and nurses to the father in French, the father translating to the daughter in Swahili then back to me in French so that I could translate back to the doctors in English…you get the picture!  To make matters worse, all the while I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable flutterings of anxiety that stirred up within me every time I remembered that this family’s feeling of comfort within this unfamiliar environment was, for the span of those few hours, relatively dependent on me.  Hospitals and operations can feel scary enough, without throwing in the factor of having to trust a young, bleary-eyed girl who had just gotten you lost to adequately relay your questions and concerns to the doctors!  I found myself stumbling over words and phrases that I do actually know, losing some vocabulary entirely—for instance, following the operation, I completely blanked on the word “droplet,” having to settle for “liquid ear medicine” instead until the father supplied the word that was escaping me. 

Nevertheless, we somehow managed to get all the necessary questions asked and answered, so about an hour or so later the father and I were shooed out to the waiting room.  Realizing mid-way into the morning that the father was under the impression that I was a French woman, when I was able to clarify that I am, indeed, American, and one that hasn’t had a good French class in about three years, I noticed almost immediately that his previously rapid-fire speech pace slowed helpfully down to the more lyrical tempo I’d gotten used to in Senegal.  Hearing too that I had spent time in Senegal seemed to open a door between us: “So you’ve seen it, my Africa?” he asked, “That is good.  You must go back.”  Amazingly, as we sat there semi-watching the news program that I could only half-hear and that he could not truly understand, he reached out to me, beginning to share bits and pieces about his family and what it is like being here, concluding, “It is hard, you know, very hard.  When you are a little one, it is easy to forget.  But when you are old, it is hard, very hard.”  As he told me stories and asked questions about my own life, I felt the tension— that suffocating feeling that I might at any moment mess everything up— begin to fade.  Here I was, there to make this family feel more comfortable, internally tallying and kicking myself for every mistake made.  And there he was, extending grace, making me feel comfortable, reminding me that sometimes it’s ok to fail.

In the reading assignment for one of my classes, I came across the idea of the “decentered host,” one who, though in a position of caregiving, falls into a position of receiving care in such a way that allows their guests to become centered instead:

As decentered hosts, we will feel awkward, disempowered, the ones interpreted rather than the ones interpreting, those beheld in uncomfortable ways by the beneficiaries of our regard.  Our own disorientation possibly is the strongest connection we may have to the disoriented ones to whom we attend.  We become more like than unlike them.[1]

And such is the gift of that flustering, wonderful morning: fumbling through my French and feeling a keen sense of having failed the family that I was there to serve, I experienced full-force the beauty of such a reversal of roles in that cold, empty waiting room!  And so, though I surely hope to do a more competent job should another opportunity to interpret arise, I am so thankful for this experience.  Far more than just challenging me to brush up on my medical French (though goodness knows I won’t be forgetting the word for droplet anytime soon!), it pushed me to consider other ways in my life in which I can allow myself to become “un-centered.” 

            The operation was over before we knew it (with post-op instructions thankfully going far more smoothly and seamlessly than the whole process leading up to it), and soon we had the smiling and sleepy daughter back to her home.  Exiting the car, the father shook my hand and thanked me, giving me a perplexed yet happy grin when I thanked him right back.  Little did he know, his is a gift I’ll be holding onto for a long time to come.

A bientôt,

Janelle

PS: If you’re wondering what the picture has to do with the post, the answer is nothing, really.  I stumbled across these miniature houses in a woodsy garden by my place and thought they were too enchanting not to share!     

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[1] William Blaine-Wallace, “The Politics of Tears: Lamentation as Justice Making,” Injustice and the Care of Souls.  p. 196. 

Pilgrimage: A Day Inside Stewart Detention Center

They thought I was his wife, his fiancée, or, at the very least, his girlfriend.  Given that I sat there waiting from 11:00 am till 3:00 pm until I was finally allowed to see him, I can see how that might have been an easy assumption to make.   The truth was that I had never before laid eyes on the man I was there to meet, but, as I sat there with a room full of women and children waiting for the chance to spend an hour “with” their husbands and fathers—and I say “with” due to the glass wall and monitored phones that stood between them—I found myself catching glimpses of what life might look like were that not the case.

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to tag along with a small van full of Emory students and Lutheran Services employees down to Stewart Detention Center, the largest detention center in the nation.  Having designed the Lumpkin-located facility to be a medium-security prison and yet failing to secure a prison contract, the Corrections Corporation of America instead struck up a deal with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to serve as a detention center for undocumented immigrants.  Now, mind you, in coming to the States undocumented, immigrants have committed a civil infraction, which most definitely is not the same thing as a crime.  In the case of undocumented immigrants, the detention system was never intended to serve a punitive function; rather, it was to be a holding place to ensure that they stay until their cases are reviewed in order to have the opportunity to appear before the judge.  Detention itself is not even legally mandated, and some areas have used alternative methods such as electronic monitoring with high rates of success.  However, because Stewart was built to be and continues to run as a prison, these men are treated as felons, when the truth is that the vast majority have committed no crime, violent or otherwise!  Many of the men were picked up through unlawful racial profiling, trapped in the detention system for nothing beyond having entered the country; others have done no more than rolling through a stoplight or driving 10 over in a residential area.   Yet here they are, men who most emphatically are not criminals, tucked far away from family and out of sight, forced into prison jumpsuits and limited to one hour a week of contact with the outside world!  Lacking the ability to fund legal representation, most spend years of their lives stuck in this system before being deported back to their country of origin.  While many of the men are what I would call economic refugees—men who have migrated due to unbearable economic straits and yet who are not afforded the rights and protection of UNHCR-recognized refugees— quite a few of them came here as asylum-seekers, fleeing situations of conflict, persecution, and torture in their home countries.

As I sat in the “waiting room” with children made antsy by the anticipation of seeing their fathers, I wondered, how many of these children don’t understand?  Given the heavily monitored gates, metal detectors, and the glass wall separating them from their loved ones, how many are led to think that their daddy is a criminal?  Seeing as they have to visit him in a prison facility, that is?  The 34,000 men filling beds in detention centers across the country tonight are there for no other reason than the (gargantuan) profit those running the facilities stand to make off of them.  These facilities cost tax payers $166 per bed, not to mention prevent family reunification, create orphans by separating children from their parents, and often deny asylum-seekers access to the therapeutic services that they need.   All of which, clearly, is in direct violation of international human rights, not to mention Christian ethics, and needs to be a status quo we’re willing to push against and push against hard. 

When I visited on Saturday, I was there volunteering through El Refugio, a truly inspiring nonprofit ministry that seeks to provide support both to families of the detainees, through offering them a free place to stay, as well as to the detainees themselves, through regular visits to those men whose families are unable to visit.  While I cannot tell you much about the man I was there to see, I can tell you that he’s a French-speaking scholar from Africa and that, after an hour laughing together and sharing stories about our travel experience, faith, and relationships, well, he reminded me a whole lot of family!  As much as I enjoyed and was challenged by his hopeful attitude and perspective, even in the face of four bleak years in the center, I was equally moved by the community I witnessed among the families present that day.  How touching it was to see women who had been making the trek down to Stewart for years reach out to those who were there for the first time, offering explanations, practical advice, and perhaps most powerfully, arm squeezes of comfort and understanding.  “Are you doing ok?” one of them asked me as we were herded out when the visitation hour came to an abrupt end.  Seeing the concern in her eyes and feeling the warmth in her gesture, I couldn’t help but tear up, so struck and humbled was I by the genuine fellowship these women were ready to extend to me before I had a chance to clarify the reasons behind my presence.

Making the three hour drive back to our homes in Atlanta, I was thankful for the opportunity to reflect on the overall experience of the day with a few of my peers.  To be frank, even today I’m still unsure just how exactly to talk about it, being a day all jumbled up with sadness, laughter, camaraderie, and anger.  But I know it’s a day I won’t readily forget, a day that will push me to learn more, to go back and back again, and, in so doing, hopefully come to speak more boldly and act more bravely.   

Pensively Yours,

Janelle

Fall Break Reflections

 

Warning: if this post makes as little sense to you as the Hebrew my Old Testament professor occasionally spouts in class, just know you have my full and ungrudging permission to hop on over to a more action-packed blog—just feeling reflective today! 

After an evening of sweet potatoes and Star Trek (we did eat other things too, no worries— I simply have an overactive penchant for alliteration), a friend of mine asked me just how exactly I was feeling about Candler now that we’ve made it half-way through our first semester.  Now, I am going to be honest here and say that I am frequently quite terrible at answering these sorts of questions on the fly.  More often than not, I’m the type of person that likes to turn these kinds of inquiries over in my head a good bit first, letting them roll around for a while until I’ve found the images, the phrasing, even the tone that fits just right.  While this habit has served me well at times, it can also leave me an inarticulate deer in the headlights, stuck groping for authenticity in the absence of pre-mediated answers.  And goodness knows, it’s moments like these that I need more of, moments that force me to wander beyond my “script,” so to speak, and that challenge me to dare to reach for new depths of the genuine and vulnerably share with others the messier, more inchoate spaces of my life. 

And sheesh, that got introspective fast, but anyways, the point was that, coming off of midterms last week and two lovely days of a restful fall break now, it’s been good to look back over the transition process of the past months.  The realization that we’re this far into the semester is both exhilarating and frightening.  Exhilarating because, in a lot of ways I feel that I’ve more or less found my stride here, at least for the moment, and I’m hopeful for the changes and challenges the coming years hold.  Frightening because, as someone who struggles with compulsively feeling the need to get “ahead” somehow, not to mention to measure up to my own ridiculous expectations, well, I guess there’s a lot of comfort in being able to say to myself, “It’s fine that you don’t have x, y, or z all figured out—after all, you just got here!”  Officially deprived of that excuse now, I’m challenged to remember the need to show grace to myself, to acknowledge my limits and lean instead on Christ’s sufficiency.  I’m shown yet again my unhealthy propensity to place greater stock in what I do than in what God has already done and is continuing to do for me, and it is here that I find again the call to ground my life in ever-greater gratitude.

One thing I’ve recently noticed about my program and my place within it is that, rather than the ordination and non-ordination tracks I’d initially been assuming, students here are much more likely to fall into the categories of theologian, activist/advocate, and scholar, with, of course, a whole lot of overlap and nuances between the three.  I realize that might seem like a silly (and yes, indeed, a vastly reductionist) observation, but for whatever reason it was really helpful for me to name.  See, drawn as I am in a variety of ways to each of these three roles, it also means that, more often than I’d care to admit, I find myself feeling as though I don’t actually fit as well as I “should” in any of them!  Which isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think, just one that can be discomfiting and one that forces me to call myself out when I’ve been unconsciously playing the comparison game with my peers…Looking back on the challenging transition period that followed my first stay in Senegal two years back, I know that I sometimes struggle when I find myself caught in these in-between spaces.  Feeling such deep sense of belonging both over there and here, I felt confused and frustrated by the fact that I could never be in both places at once, overlooking the immense blessing I’d been given in the form of this second family of mine.  And so, drawing from that experience at least, I do think a whole lot of good can happen from in-between spaces, long as I let go of the need to fit myself neatly into one spot or another and am instead simply open to being taught by friends and mentors on each of these different paths.

Somewhat unrelated, but we read an excerpt from Henri Nouwen in my Pastoral Care class, and all of it was so beautiful that, goodness, maybe I should have retyped it all here rather than plowing through these random speculations.  Too late for that, however, so I’ll just share a few sentences:

“When we are not afraid to enter into our own center and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved.  This experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift, and that we can only make others free because we are set free by Him whose heart is greater than ours…” (The Wounded Healer, 1972)

Gorgeous, right?  Though, as usual, far easier to agree with than to live out truly, but here’s to trying!

Hope this finds you well,
Janelle

Thoughts from a Third-Floor Study Carrel

I sat down with 30 minutes to start drafting a Pastoral Care paper.  This came out instead:

A few hours ago, I said good-bye for two weeks to the friend who has become one of my very closest here at Candler.  Tomorrow she’s headed back home to do last-minute preparations for the ceremony, get married, and, of course, honeymoon!  Now, there are probably only very, very few reasons for a temporary parting that are more wonderful or joyous, and yes, I know, two weeks is a pretty short amount of time.  However, as I waved her on her way, I felt it—that unmistakable wallowing feeling that makes your insides heavy, your eyes a little watery, your mind a tad mushy.  After all, I sat there thinking to myself, this is the friend I do everything with! We sit together in class, sit outside together “working” (ie, chatting) between classes, go to chapel together, fill up our water bottles before and after everything together, sometimes even talk on the phone together on our ways back to our houses, and well, you get the idea!  Almost as soon as she was out of sight, I felt this pang of loneliness settle for a moment, only to then feel immediately foolish for feeling it, seeing as I’d been sitting by myself for a grand total of two minutes!

Shortly after, I made myself enter Pitts Theological Library with the goal of knocking out a bit of a Pastoral Care paper prior to a dinner event for which I needed to stay on campus another little while.  Though Pitts houses one of the best collections of theological material in the nation and has been noted for its distinctive architecture, I had yet to really venture inside (barring the requisite campus tour last spring) owing to the fact that, at least in my memory, it was very dark and very pink.  However, as I made my way up to the third floor, I was taken aback by the way each study carrel was nestled between two short stacks of bookshelves on both sides, all up against these sweeping outward-facing windows.  Just as I sat down, the sun shifted in a way that sent rays pouring through the blinds, covering the books around me with a thick golden hue.  The picture I took doesn’t do it justice a) because I am a terrible photographer (just about the worst) and b) not having a camera on me and so taking this instead on my laptop, I couldn’t for the life of me figure how to capture the scene without being in it myself…basically, you should have been there with me! 

Again, I’m sure in some of your minds the whole formula of “friend leaving” plus “beautiful library” equates to something along the lines of “Janelle is a wee bit crazy.”  Which, as I also conceded earlier, is likely quite true in a sense!  What it is I am trying to communicate, however, is just how truly good it was for my whole being to sit there soaking up the setting sun’s rays, surrounded by those gorgeous, dusty old books.  (Arguably less great for my sinuses, surely, but oh so good for my soul!)  Sitting there, not working at all on the aforementioned paper, I was reminded yet again of how deep is my need to cultivate more gratitude in my daily life.  Earlier in the year, I’d been working hard to remind myself that gratitude and trust belong in that large box in my head that I so often jam full with worries.  But today, God and those lovely, lovely library windows reminded me that gratitude is meant to overflow into the spaces I’ve carved out for self-pity just as much, until that too is transformed into something good, maybe even golden.

Thanks for listening (even and especially when I don’t make all that much sense!),

Janelle