by Amyn
In order to integrate better into the community and maybe help some people out, I decided to do volunteer work. Opposed to my job applications that were rejected left and right, they contacted me on the same day. I was beginning to feel invisible!
We had a video call and they explained how this would work and they actually had a task for me. It was to accompany a refugee to a clinic and translate Farsi into English. I thought why not?
The refugee was an Afghan woman whom, in my correspondence with the agency, I always mentioned by name -which was Mrs. K****- and they always addressed as “the refugee”. So I called Mrs. K and asked her to give me the address for the clinic and in response she just sent me a German letter with the info. Later, I found out she wasn’t trying to be rude, just wasn’t a real tech-savvy.
So on Friday, I got there, on time, and after a few minutes of searching- because she also didn’t know how to send a location- I found her; and her husband. She was a middle-aged woman wearing hijab and her husband looked a bit younger and was wearing shorts and a cap.
After a short inquiry I found out that this is a breast exam appointment. She had done some imaging before and today they were going to take some samples for further analysis. We went to the reception and a woman who promptly answered to my question “Do you speak English?” with a “No.” gave us some German forms to fill out.
While I translated the form with Google Translate, which had some weird questions such as “Have you lost faith in God in the past week?”, a man was rocking a crying baby in his arms in the waiting room, and the second he handed the kid over the mother, s/he stopped crying. Everyone laughed. Mrs. K turned to me and said: “You think after 9 months the child has had enough of the mother, but the mother’s job is never over.”
© Amyn 2024-08-18