The Language Connection

There is a conspicuous gap in my blog entries, and there’s no particular reason for it. Well, other than, for the last year I’ve been balancing clinical work with an online English to Spanish translation class. For a while, my schedule got a little hairy: from being on-call after hours and on weekends to writing Spanish essays and translating medico-legal text into Spanish. It was a great learning experience, but I needed a break! So I completed the class, took a week off from work and traveled to California for a vacation.

My husband and I like hiking, so we went off the beaten path and stayed in 29 Palms. From there we hiked all the trails in Joshua Tree National Park. Then we made our way to Death Valley and ultimately Valley of Fire in neighboring Nevada. The last stop was a tech conference in Vegas. He and I especially enjoy the solitude of the trails – of being surrounded by nature. Ending up in Vegas probably wasn’t the best way to conclude the trip. We went from solitude to cigarette smoke. From open spaces to open bars. From quality time to crowded casinos. We did it for the tech conference, but conference or not I think my husband and I can safely say we’ve had our fill of Vegas.

It’s amazing how you can be in a place with so many people, and yet be isolated. People are there for their own agenda. A bachelorette party. Tickets to Zumanity. High school reunion. Tech conference. People are all speaking the same language, but they don’t communicate. They’re planning the next excursion. The next exciting thing! The pool. A new tattoo. A club. Keno. And they walk past each other in halls, but don’t look at each other. Eyes are drawn to the flashing lights, or to the phone. Eyes fixate on objects seeking the ultimate happiness. But it will always be a fool’s journey.

One occurrence, however, brought an instant connection. A snap back to reality. To humanness. In the hotel where we were staying, there was a security measure in place to make sure that only guests of the hotel could take the elevators up to the room floors. That measure included taking the room card, swiping it in a slot in the elevator, which would then allow the person to press the floor number of choice. Anyone without a room card could not activate the floor numbers and the elevator would not travel anywhere.

One evening, my husband and I walked into the elevator bank to find a few young guys trying to communicate with a family standing in an elevator surprised that they could not get it to work. They only spoke Spanish, and the young man helping did not, so he was motioning what to do with the room card.

It felt so good to be able to look at them and say, “ Ponga la tarjeta en la apertura, y oprime el número del piso. Es para la seguridad del hotel”. 

“Gracias”.

All eyes in that elevator fixated on me, and I caught the gaze of an older, grandmotherly woman smiling.

“Disfruten al máximo de su estancia”.

“Gracias”.

And the doors closed and they were gone. The young guys, not understanding the conversation, disappeared behind the closing doors of another elevator.

I felt satisfaction. Not from the simple act of telling the family how to use the elevator, but satisfaction at the connection I was able to make with these people through language. A message I have to anyone out there learning another language: don’t view language learning as something needed to pass a test, or to find the bathroom in a restaurant.  Look at it as a tool for connecting with people in a very personal way. Despite the horror stories we see on the news, of  rouge individuals who take pleasure in killing their fellow man, people, in general, are social beings. They’re gregarious. They don’t want to isolate. They want friendships and relationships with others. The more languages you know, the more expansive your vocabulary, the more people and connections you make. You hold the secret code, the key to familiarity. I wish I could know all languages. But, I’ll settle for knowing a very few very well.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” Nelson Mandela

Joshua Tree, 29 Palms, CA