Posted on 05/12/2007 3:54:59 PM PDT by buccaneer81
Language difficulties aren't going away anytime soon Saturday, May 12, 2007 3:40 AM
Another tragedy happened recently. Four-year-old Jennifer Garcia, who lived at the Parkview Apartments on the Far West Side of Columbus, drowned. A life has been lost.The 911 call of this incident is disheartening to listen to. The frantic stepfather begins: "She fell in the water, I don't know how long maybe she stay in water. Rome-Hilliard, the apartments, the ParkView Apartments." He continues: "She drowned in the water, I don't know how long, she stay in the water maybe 15 - 20 minutes ago."
This is followed by a frenzied process of procedural and necessary questions. The 911 dispatcher asks, "Did she drown?" -- "Yeah, she's right here, she was on the bicycle she was riding, she's almost dying," responds the stepfather. The interpreter service is connected 90 seconds into the call, and there are 35 to 40 valuable seconds spent on identifying the Client ID personal code for the service.
Why didn't the dispatcher understand the caller? It is obvious that the dispatcher does not understand people with accents. At one point she admits, "I can't understand the caller." Manuel Bravos did speak with an accent. For someone who has not been around people with accents, it may be difficult to understand, especially in a high-stress situation. The secondary question here is, in this time of growing diversity, what can we do to better prepare 911 dispatchers to understand people with accents? There will be more 911 calls from people with accents.
Why didn't the caller stay and wait for the ambulance? In the call, the parents' concern was for the life of their daughter. The dispatchers are trying to keep him on the line to obtain more information, which is the standard procedure, and to assure him that help is on the way. Emergency services were dispatched almost immediately. "I've got medical on the way already," said the man from the fire-alarm office. The stepfather did not understand that services were dispatched and understandably thought he must take Jennifer to the hospital.
How can the community understand the 911 system better? Where are the resources to educate the community?
When the interpreter service is connected, several seconds are spent on client identification. Language lines are for-profit entities and need to legitimize their clients. In this age of technology, however, is there a way to legitimize this electronically, then verify verbally after the call?
"Why don't they learn to speak English?" -- this question can be heard through the paper-thin office walls and in the not-so-private circles. My answer is very clear: The stepfather was speaking English. He spoke English up to the point when the translator service was connected. It is obvious to me that he understood the importance of learning English. All immigrants whom I know want to learn to speak English. We must understand that one can speak English and still have a strong native accent. This is common, regardless of the native language.
Columbus and Franklin County need to make the shift from seeing language differences as a "barrier" to seeing it as part of our community fabric. "I'm going to get somebody to help us with this language barrier here," said the fire dispatcher during the call. Language is never a "barrier," regardless of the language being spoken. Language is communication, and communication is not a barrier. We are the barrier if we do not understand different languages.
How can we ensure that Franklin County identifies and implements a means of communicating with callers who have a limited English proficiency? This has been a central question since the tragic fire on the West Side in 2004 where 10 Mexican immigrants died.
Is hiring bilingual and multilingual 911 dispatchers needed? What kind of training would be helpful? Is this an issue that all public-service answering points in the county need to deal with?
In Columbus and Franklin County, we continue to see the growth of the immigrant community. In fact, it's the population that is most substantially growing in our area. There will be more calls coming in with life-and-death situations from people with English as their second language. There will more calls from people with Spanish accents, Somali accents, European accents, Ethiopian accents, Nigerian accents and others. Columbus and Franklin County need to be better prepared for this.
I have no doubt that many of the leaders of the city and Franklin County understand this. However, too often systems and bureaucracy bog things down. At times protocol, old-story procedure, politics and even turf issues impede overall efficiency, effectiveness and change.
Author and organization consultant Margaret Wheatley says, "Bureaucracies don't respond in time, but people do." In life-and-death situations, there has to be a simpler way. A way that just might be more effective in saving lives.
Fortunately, bureaucracies and systems are made of people. Let's hope that the good people in these systems move to improve this process immediately.
RUBÉN CASTILLA HERRERA Latino Leader SHIFT Initiative
Columbus
Boy...the journalist who wrote this article never had to make a customer support call to a help desk in India.
The author is a certified, card carrying Idiot!
After the fire department came and busted up the oven in the rent house, the firemen said they couldn’t read the directions on the stove and had placed a chicken in the oven and turned it on clean. The bird was well done. The house was supposed to be non-smoking, but —
Learn English, your best defense from disaster.
Seems clear to me.
Life in danger, send response
RUBÉN CASTILLA HERRERA is trying to pick a fight where ther is no fight
Why is this our problem? There are many adult education classes that teach English.
ok, what college offers a degree in the study of accents ?
I know an EMS dispatcher who talked an old foreign-born woman through CPR on her beloved invalid Mikhat, who didn’t wake up when she brought him his breakfast.
“My cat.”
True story. Heard the tape.
Mrs VS
I think Hillary has a School of Multilingualism. Its advertised on the Rush Limbaugh show.
They can blame us but they end up paying for it.
Get a clue from Mrs. William Clinton.. she has several accents...
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