Immigrants and their grandmothers
I immigrated to Brooklyn from St. Petersburg with my parents, aunt and grandfather in the March of 1993. We arrived in the middle of a snowstorm and one of my first memories on American soil is of my father going out to buy groceries with canvas produce bags in his pocket. We certainly were not the front runners of the green movement. We were complete newcomers to the system, unaware of some of the smallest details of everyday life in New York. We were also only one family out of the immigration wave of thousands who arrived in NYC in an attempt to make it in the new world.
I attended the lecture on the rights of immigrants and development of facilities available to immigrants because I was curious to see what had changed and what hadn’t in the past decade. The lecture was about the new ways that immigrants would be taken care of in hospitals and emergency clinics, as well as in other municipal facilities. The two female lecturers spoke about housing, financial help, medical care, education, language development and assimilation. A large portion of time was devoted to speaking about enhancing the service that non-English speaking residents were facing in hospitals. Many issues were discussed but one in particular caused me to react strongly. The speaker had mentioned that because the list of services and application forms were translated in as many as 10 different languages, immigrants had the right to demand the forms in their native language and even to demand a translator who would sit with them. Having acknowledged that many elderly people bring their younger relatives to the hospital as translators, the speaker took time to explain that this specific practice was discouraged. Instead, the speaker proposed that an elderly immigrant experiencing pain and thrown into the confusing heap of medical history applications in unfamiliar environment was going to benefit more from having to demand that he be given medical care in the attendance of a translator who would take pains to to describe clearly what the doctor was doing. It seems to be that this idea is arrogant and insensitive to the the actual needs of immigrant patients. Imagine an old sick woman, struggling to formulate even a simple sentence in English. From who will she make demands? Of what demands that she can make does she know? It would all erupt in a painful spectacle.
It seems like increasing the availability of English courses would alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, a little bit later in the lecture I learned that the first programs that suffer because of financial woes are those that provide English lessons to seniors of the immigrant community.