“Alfred, as translator, you have the most important job in the project. I can give people medicines, and do many things for the patients, but I can’t talk to them. And they can’t talk to me. Without that, it is almost impossible for me to find out what is wrong with someone. We say in medicine, the story is 90 per cent of the diagnosis. And even if I get it right without one, I can’t tell them. I am useless.’”
- James Maskalyk, MD, in Six Months in Sudan
A visit last week to a country that functions in a language I do not speak got me thinking again about this complicated task we call communication. Lest we forget, communication involves both speaking and listening. North American culture excels at the former and perhaps has become essentially disinterested in the latter.
To be sure, it is actually surprising the amount of successful communication that can be accomplished between two individuals who do not speak the other’s language. I was encouraged that I was able to carry out several commercial transactions despite not being conversant in Spanish.
And listening to our translator reminded me of the significant overlap between Spanish and English. In fact, those few days in Latin America gave me a renewed appreciation for the importance of precision when it comes to word choice. Verbosity is not equivalent to effective communication.
Nonetheless, as Maskalyk indicates above, when it comes to exchanging vital information, nothing replaces the imperative nature of being so fully immersed in a language that one capably grasps nuance, intonation, gravity of expression, cliché, word selection and all that goes into effective listening.
Reading Maskalyk’s riveting story of his service in Africa with Doctors Without Borders happily coincided with my recent trip where it was frequently in my best interests to do more listening than talking. As I listened to the stories of impoverished people in rural Guatemala, Maskalyk’s observation that “the story is 90 per cent of the diagnosis” kept coming to mind. Imagine how different our personal worlds and collective world might be if we each lived our days from that perspective.
Accordingly, I’m still listening and re-listening to some of the stories I heard while in Guatemala and I intend to do so for some time yet. I’m consciously trying to resist the inclination I think comes too easily for many of us – offering a diagnosis before we’ve exerted the discipline to truly hear the entire story.
Tim Callaway is the pastor of Faith Community Baptist Church in Airdrie. You can email him at [email protected]
