Brandeis: Common App Personal Statement

My grandmother could not read the eviction notice taped to her door, so for three weeks she thought it was a flyer. It was in English; she reads only Amharic. When I finally translated it for her, the deadline had already passed.¹That was the afternoon I understood that the distance between my grandmother and her own life was about ninety days of legal notice she could not decode. I had been her translator since I was nine, ordering at restaurants, explaining her prescriptions, sitting beside her at the pharmacy counter. I had always thought of it as a chore, the way other kids think of unloading the dishwasher. After the notice, I started thinking of it as a kind of literacy that nobody had taught me on purpose.So I built something small. On the radiator in our apartment lobby, the one that never worked, I left a binder. Inside were the forms our building's families needed most often, each one paired with a plain-language explanation I had written: how to request a repair, how to dispute a charge, what a lease renewal actually obligates you to.²I translated the explanations into Amharic and Tigrinya, and where my own vocabulary failed, I knocked on doors and asked the aunties who spoke better than I did. The binder grew. Mr. Tesfaye added a page on food stamp recertification. The Berhane sisters added one on school enrollment. By winter it had a waiting list, which is an absurd thing to say about a binder on a radiator, but it was true.What surprised me was not that it helped. What surprised me was how much I had assumed I would be the one doing the helping. I had pictured myself as the bridge, the bilingual kid who carried information across. Instead the binder became a place where my neighbors taught each other, and my role shrank to keeping the pages in order. That demotion was the best thing that happened to me that year.³It made me suspicious of the word advocate, which I had collected like a merit badge. Advocacy that depends on a single indispensable person is fragile; it disappears the moment that person leaves for college. So I spent the spring trying to make myself unnecessary. I trained two younger kids in the building to maintain the binder and to update it when forms changed. I wrote down where I found reliable translations and which city offices actually answered the phone.I am not naive about how little a binder can do against a housing market or an immigration system. My grandmother still got that notice, and the next family will get one too. But I have stopped believing that the size of a problem determines the size of an honest response. You translate the document in front of you. You teach someone else to translate the next one. You keep the pages in order.⁴At the pharmacy counter where I started, I am no longer the only one who can read the label. That is a smaller victory than I once wanted, and a more durable one than I ever expected to build.⁵