Mile 2916: Señor Fixity-Fix-It

Above: Miami traffic to Key Biscayne was a pain this weekend due to the Sony Ericsson Tennis Open.

On the way down, somewhere in the swampy regions of southern Georgia along southbound Interstate 75, I was driving while bopping along to the groovy tunes of Spyro Gyra when....

SSSNNAAPPPP!

... as I looked around the car to see if anything went wrong, I noticed a white streak from the passenger-side pillar of the windshield beginning to crawl across until it gradually came to a stop, forming a discrete line across my windshield. Now, noticing that the line was 1) horizontal, 2) not moving toward the roof of my car as my car was moving at highway speeds, and 3) not disappearing with the truckloads of windshield wiper fluid I poured on it, I figured it was a crack caused by some random piece of debris on the road. Since it didn't grow initially, I drove down to Miami thinking nothing would happen, but by the third day in town, the crack grew up the pillar of my car and towards the center of the glass.

Fortunately, my insurance covers windshield replacements, so I had it fixed just in case it'd get worse.

They sent a repairman over to my apartment in Miami to fix the glass. I met him in the parking lot outside my garage. The man was middle age, but built, clearly a working blue-collar man. He had drips of sweat coming down as he spent the moments outside preparing his tools while waiting for me to come out in the Miami sun that was gradually intensifying. As I looked inside his van, a picture of his kin and a glimmering cross was hanging from the rearview mirror of his van.

I walked up to him and said, Are you here to repair my glass?

The first thing he said to me was, I can't speak mucho English.

I replied to him with a rather nervous smile: Puedo hablar un poco español. He smiled back at me, with a slight chuckle, and he got to work. As the work went on, here we were, both of us trying to speak each one's first language, and using different hand motions, synonyms (oh, my spanglish was on a roll!), and broken english/spanish, yet we were getting what each other's message. I'll have to say that the man had mad repair skills: the windshield repair didn't appear to be fácil (easy), but he was able to pay attention to the details to get the work done, and yet focus on our conversation quite well.

As the work came to completion, he said to me, grateful for our ability to communicate, Puedes hablar como mi en ingles (You can talk just like me in English), and I replied back to him, Solomente con practica. With a smile, we wished each other a good day, I gave him a small tip for his buen trabajo (good work), and were off on our separate ways.

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This is the thing. After meeting the repairman, I thought about the term language barrier. But is language really a barrier if both parties try to understand one another? It's only a barrier if the two parties don't try hard enough to understand each other. I thought it was really cool how we figured our way around where possible misunderstandings could occur. I'm going to encounter people either in the hospital or in my practice that aren't going to speak my language, and I see how creativity in communication can go a long way to understanding where another person is coming from.

I've said before, I'm an optimist. Although, I can see how people still see this situation as a language barrier, I still prefer to look at it as a language opportunity.