Speaking the English

In the course of two months I have managed to be converted into 'Resident English Speaker' at the Facultad Nacional de Salud Publica (FNSP). Who has done this converting? My friend the Dean has seen me fit to rent out like the latest version of Rosetta Stone; a trend picked up by a different faculty member each day.

It all started with the suggestion that I start weekly English conversation classes as part of a community service project. Due to the large number of students and professors who study English but do not get much practice at listening or speaking, I serve as their perfect link between books and real-life necessity. On Mondays and Tuesdays I now spend my two lunch hours animating my students to practice formulating gramatically correct simple questions like "Where did you hang out last night?" or discussing national environmental concerns. As wonderful as it is to know that I am helping people with their English communication skills, I selfishly love meeting new interesting friends and leading discussions that benefit my own knowledge of Colombian issues.

Along with assuming the position of Mizz Teacher, I also serve as chief English document consultant. At first it was exciting to be called into a new office and asked what a professor in Germany was requesting in the most recent installment of an academic email conversation. It makes me feel important, not to mention that I am learning infinitely valuable information about the international public health community. For example, I have worked on important national proposals to the WHO for a project linking topics of academic research and government policy making (with a lot of funding money on the line). Several people are relying on my comments on another proposal so they can participate in an international qualitative research exchange learning project with the University of Chicago. But because the FNSP has been so generous to open up so many other opportunities for me, I find it difficult to turn away any English solicitor even though I am frequently distracted from my own projects with the high volume of work being presented to me. And as much as I try to fly incognito, it's not like I can just blend in as one of the other students when everywhere I go the 'Gringa' flag waves high above my blue eyes, light brown hair and different accent.

Maybe this is a good lesson for familiarizing myself with personal linguistic limits, because I have also found myself in some rather humiliating situations. Two weeks ago I was asked to translate the entire two-hour presentation of a professor coming from UC Irvine for an international conference on Occupational Health. Although I received his 60 slides with ample time to familiarize myself with the correlation between hypertension and job tension, followed by an hour-long one-on-one explanation of his life's work, I still lacked the depth of medical terminology to adequately convey the importance of the research. It turns out that his daughter attended Pitzer College and is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Anthropology by completing field work in the Caribbean, so we not only immediately had a common connection but a mutual respect. Unfortunately, by the end of four hours of translating for the presentation, social interaction, and professional panel, I was ready to burst into tears. I felt like even though I tried my hardest, I had botched up an important cross-cultural opportunity for Latin American specialists to impress upon a famous North American doctor their valuable research, reflected poorly on my Alma Mater, and had failed as an Ambassador of Goodwill.

In the future, I will know to pass on these sorts of requests to those professors who I know have a much higher level of multicultural and multilingual competence (and who have also pursued several degrees of graduate education to understand systolic ambulatory blood pressure) than myself, while gladly accepting projects that hone my forte of ruthless peer reviews. I guess that despite feeling more comfortable each day in my second tongue I still have a lot of Spanish to learn before I can consider myself fully fluent.