translation

I'm trying to resign myself to the fact that I'll never be able to properly explain this place to anyone who's never experienced it.

I was working on B Ward yesterday evening. There aren't so many babies anymore, but those who are there have been there for what feels like forever. Something like a month and a half. They think they run the place, and the noise level was significantly intense for most of the shift.

During a quiet moment close to the end of the evening, an anesthetist came in to speak to one of the patients about her operation in the morning. This particular lady speaks no English and, as it turns out, was holding a small grudge against us for jabbing her with needles to start her IV. Thankfully, my patient in the next bed, a sweet, smiling woman about my age whose face and arms and torso are covered in tumors, could communicate with the surly Oma. The only one she couldn't understand was the anesthetist.

So I stood at the foot of her mattress as the doctor sat on the end of his patient's bed. He asked a question, which I relayed in Liberian to my patient, who then asked her neighbor in their tribal language, Mano. The answer would return through the same channels. The interview took a surprisingly short amount of time, given the convoluted methods we were using. When prompted at the end, the old lady had only one question, and it wasn't for the anesthetist.

She scowled at me as my giggling interpreter/patient translated. She want to know why you people juke her (stick her with needles). She say that thing on her hand is not good. I scowled back at the Oma until we both started laughing and explained through my trusty translator that the thing on her hand was good and that if she took it out, I would come juke her again, any time of the day or night.

At which point she mumbled something and disappeared under her covers. My patient turned to me, grinning broadly, happy to be providing clarification. She said 'good night'. And she will keep the thing on the hand.


It must take incredible courage to come into this ship for surgery. To be surrounded by white people who don't speak your language and who do things to you that make no sense, whether you like it or not. My friend, Amy, took another patient for a dressing change yesterday. When they came back, he was proud to share the new knowledge she had just imparted to him while juggling the gauze and tape.

I learn about my heart. And I learn about my lunges. And I learn ... Here his memory got fuzzy, until prompted by a laughing Amy. You should only have one wife. Two women is too many problems.

When he says he learned about his heart or his lunges (lungs), he's not talking about cellular physiology. Today, Jacob learned that he has something called a heart that pumps his blood and two things called lungs that help him breathe. He didn't even know. Most of them don't.

And yet they gather together their pain and their fear and they walk up the gangway anyway, lured by the promise that maybe, just maybe, they'll get to leave whole again. How can I go back to North America and explain what it feels like to look into a patient's eyes and see that? How can I share my experiences here in a way that will make sense to the people closest to me? How can I make them understand what I've been doing when my own life sometimes feels so foreign to me?

I think I'm going to need a translator.