Sharing Language
Written by SYM staff member, Alyssa McLeod
About two months ago, three clients walked through the doors of the Breakfast Program. An SYM staff member greeted the clients, and I noticed there was a hold-up with getting them signed in. As I walked closer to where they were gathered, I noticed that the hold-up was due to the clients communicating in Spanish and the SYM staff member communicating in English. I quickly jumped into translator mode to help get their names and birthdays logged and to welcome them to our program. They were pleasantly surprised to hear Spanish being spoken, and I asked the clients where they were from. Two were from Venezuela and had lived in the U.S. for a few years but in Texas. They had only been living in Seattle a few months. One client was from Cuba. They asked where I was from and how I knew Spanish, and I explained that I had studied it for years but that it was my focus in college. A week or so later, we were up to about five Spanish-speaking clients attending the Breakfast Program daily. An additional country was represented in the group: Colombia. Another week passed, and we had up to seven Spanish-speaking clients, the majority of whom were Venezuelan.
A passion and value I hold dearly is that of connection being fostered through language. It is a no-brainer that it is far easier to connect with anyone when you speak the same literal language. It is therefore hopefully also a no-brainer that it would be a disorienting, uncomfortable, and even frightening experience to not be understood or be able to understand because of language, especially when you are speaking a language that is a minority in a place like Seattle, WA.
While I was a great resource for immediacy or fluency, the volunteers at the Breakfast Program weren’t shy about attempting to communicate via Google Translate or even in trying to learn some words in Spanish or teach some words in English. We all giggled our way through and practiced patience and empathy with one another as we communicated. Eventually, the clients would come in and play salsa music from Venezuela on their laptops. They’d talk about home and who they had to leave behind. They’d share about work they wanted to do, the paperwork needed to pursue that work, and creative interests they have. At our Drop-In center they connected best with SYM staff member, Antonio, also a native Spanish speaker. It felt good to me that they had a connection point in the mornings with someone who spoke their maternal language and a connection in the afternoons with someone else who spoke their maternal language.
I saw and experienced first-hand how immediately trust is able to be established between people when language is shared, or even when an earnest attempt is made to communicate in one’s mother tongue: stutters, mistakes, and all. It is a beautiful picture of connection but is also an encouragement toward courage and putting yourself out there linguistically. You don’t have to have grown up speaking a language to pursue learning it. That is a large part of the immigrant experience, after all.