Georgetown: Personal essay

My grandmother does not trust the pharmacy, so the pharmacy is me. ¹Twice a month I sit at our kitchen table in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with her prescriptions fanned out like a hand of cards, and I translate. Not just Spanish to English, though I do that too, but doctor into human. Lisinopril becomes the pill for your heart that you take with breakfast. Metformin becomes the one that makes your stomach unhappy if you skip food, so do not skip food. She nods, repeats it back to me in Spanish, and I write it on the bottle in marker so she remembers. ²I have been doing this since I was eleven, when my mother started working a second shift and the job of being the family's go-between fell to the kid with the best English. At first I hated it. I missed soccer practices to sit on hold with insurance companies. I learned words no twelve-year-old should have to know, like deductible, and prior authorization, and the specific tone a representative uses right before she tells you no. ³But somewhere in the years of phone calls, I stopped seeing it as a chore and started seeing the system. I noticed that my grandmother got worse care when I was not in the room, that a confused question in accented English got a shorter answer than the same question in fluent English. I noticed how much depended on whether someone could advocate for you, and how many people in our neighborhood had no eleven-year-old to do their advocating. ⁴That noticing has shaped everything. I started a Saturday clinic-day program through our parish, where bilingual high schoolers sit with elderly neighbors and help them read their medical mail, fill their forms, and understand their bottles. We have helped forty families. It is small. Most of what we do is just being the person in the room who can say, in the right language, here is what this means. ⁵I am not the kid with the most impressive transcript at my school. My talents are unglamorous: patience on hold, a steady voice, the ability to make a frightened person feel less alone in a confusing system. ⁶But I have learned that being a translator is bigger than language. It is standing in the gap between people and the institutions that are supposed to serve them, and refusing to let anyone get lost in there. When my grandmother thanks me, she does not say thank you for translating. She says gracias por cuidarme, thank you for taking care of me. I think that is the work I want to do for the rest of my life. I just did not know, at the kitchen table, that it had a name.