Finding My Voice

There were a lot of awful things about my deployment to Iraq a few years back. The terrible leadership. The car bombs. The aimlessness of it all. But the most mundane and maddening thing about it, day after day, was the terrible translation (we had one awesome interpreter, but he was the exception that proved the rule.)

 

Granted, these poor guys (all guys) were in over their heads. Most of our translators were young kids who'd picked up English from bootlegged movies or foul-mouthed GIs. They could tell someone to put their hands up, or to go screw themselves, but that pretty much emptied the English bank. The Army, bless their hearts, tried fixing this by hiring Iraqi-American immigrants to come back and work with military units.

 

The poor guy that got assigned to us, a cab driver in the States, just stared blankly at me the first time we worked together, put on my mission to talk to the about the division between municipal, provincial, and federal public service delivery (defeated, "who pays the garbage man?" I finally asked). Or the time an angry Iraqi civilian decided to give us a big piece of his mind as we walked out of a government building. After several minutes of angry gestures and disgusted looks at me while he spit "Amerika!" the translator looked at me straight-faced and said "ummm...he pretty much is thanking you for kicking out sadam. pretty much." Oh, my.

 

This year's been different, and I owe much of the credit to "the Little General," our Five-Foot-nothing Afghan-American interpreter who throws her weight around like an NFL player, speaks English with a Queens accent, Dari with an Iranian accent and, God love her, knows the Afghan word for "transparency." She's assigned to translate for my boss and me, and I'll be the first to admit we'd be lucky to be half as effective without her.

 

She knows that when we say "hello," in English, what we really mean is "God's peace be upon you. How is your health? How is your family? How I've longed to see you again since last we parted. Are you tired? May you have the energy of a young athlete. etc. etc. etc." She knows how to walk that fine line between lecturing an Afghan official on corruption and actually calling him corrupt. She can turn from butter-you-up sweet to don't-mess-with-me business on a dime. She can entertain 100 Afghan boys on the spot to keep them from overrunning a construction site inspection. The woman can take our blunt, clumsy, culturally ignorant American word bombs and turn them into sharp, effective, respectful Dari. "Fix my words," we often whisper, just before we say something we know is stupid (we often say stupid things.) And she reliably fixes our words while staying to true to our meaning. 

 

My boss and I spend the day between missions giving her hell. "Go home, your husband misses you, spend time with your parents, go back to school. We're here on orders, but you can leave whenever you want." But she knows we'd be lost without her. She's our voice. And our friend.