My past two Anthropology classes have been longer than normal -- three hours on Friday and nearly four hours on Monday. Long classes are often long and annoying, but these weren't.
These were field trips!
On Friday we went into the Jamaica Plain area of Boston and spent two hours walking around a mainly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. It's historically Dominican, but a lot of the people with whom we interacted were Cuban. We split into groups, but various people went into stores and looked around, found community playgrounds and gardens, got haircuts, and ate yummy food. I did several of those, but by far the most exciting was the yummy food.
We ate at El Oriental de Cuba, which is a pretty well known restaurant in the area. One of the few customers in the restaurant when we were there -- we were in the restaurant between eleven and noon, before most people eat lunch -- told us that she and her friends go there a lot for both the food and the community. I really like Cuban food, so I was pretty excited. Well, okay, my experience with Cuban food in general is pretty limited, but I'm a big fan of empanadas.
And there they were, on the first page of the menu. I decided to get two, but it took me a while to decide which ones. For the first I chose chicken, something pretty standard. For the second, I asked the waiter what he recommended, so I ended up getting a guava and cheese empanada. It definitely had a different taste than traditional meat or cheese empanadas because of the sweetness of the guava, but it was very good.
On Monday, we took a bus into Boston to go to the branch of the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Chelsea neighborhood, where there are extensive services for recent immigrants, particularly refugees. This was related to a book we're reading, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which is about a conflict between American medicine and Hmong culture. (There was an article in the New York Times about the book's main character recently.) We talked to the refugee assistance program manager, the refugee school program director, a nurse who works with refugee women, the director of a group that deals with domestic violence mainly in immigrant communities, the two directors of a program that identifies people with a history of missed cancer screenings and helps them overcome the barriers preventing them coming to screenings, and the director of the medical interpreter program.
The most interesting speakers were the directors of the screening program and the medical interpreters. Both focused a lot on using interpreters not just for direct language but also for cultural understanding -- they are navigators, community health workers, cultural brokers. The medical interpreter mentioned that it's often not enough to be able to speak a language; it takes longer to understand a particular culture than it does to learn a language. The director of the screening program talked about being patient, listening, and asking very specific questions in order to identify and understand what was preventing people from coming to screenings. The director of medical interpreters talked about explaining a patient's wants and needs to health care providers as well as giving the providers cultural context, but then she also said that medical interpreters also have to explain medically necessary choices to patients.
As engineers, something that was cool was hearing the director of the screening program talk about the system they use to identify the people the program needs to contact. They used to do lots of the work manually, but now they have a system on the computer that can identify high risk patients and that makes it a lot easier to keep track of what calls have been made, when people have appointments for screenings, and when/if a follow-up call is necessary. The director talked about how easy it was to work with the people who developed the system, which was really good to hear -- that's people doing design well. So that actually related to the course in more ways that we expected. We thought, going to the hospital, that we would hear about how the hospital works with different cultures, but we also got to hear about people doing design for a group of people with a very specific need, which we read a lot about in the first week of the course. For some of us, that focus on designing for people is why we're at Olin, so it was cool to see that come up when we didn't expect it.
No comments:
Post a Comment