SOY UNA SCIENCE WRITER VERDAD

by Beryl Lieff Benderly

“Spanish-speaking health writer…teaching experience preferred” read the listing on the NASW Web site. I could scarcely believe my eyes.

“¡Ai, dios mío!” I thought. It described me perfectly!

I scrolled down in amazement. An organization I had never heard of, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), sought leaders for workshops on health writing in Latin America. These workshops would take place in Mexico, a country I already knew, and Chile, a region in South America I had long dreamed of visiting.

Spanish is not my native tongue, but long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I lived much of my life in it and taught for two years at la Universidad de Puerto Rico. This was years before I wrote my first words for pay, but no matter. My first exposure to Spanish was a crash course at age 20 (I already had French under my belt, honed through classroom studies and a summer in French-speaking Switzerland). Fourteen renditions of Anthro I and countless chats with friends, colleagues, shop clerks, etc., and I was fluent in Español.

Now an established freelance journalist, I sent my résumé in response to the online ad. Not long after, I was sitting in the ICFJ office, describing my background, interests, and clips to Robert Taylor, ICFJ’s director of scientific and environmental programs, and Luis Botello, director of Latin American programs. Conversing in English, Luis made the switch I knew he would, nonchalantly posing the next question in Spanish. Equally nonchalantly (I hoped), I answered in kind. I hadn’t used Spanish in a work situation for a while, I told him, but could still speak it on the phone, understand it on the radio, and eavesdrop on conversations on the Metro.

A few months later, I was standing at the front of a hotel conference room, first in Puebla, Mexico, and then in Santiago de Chile, explaining my views on the ethics of writing about purported treatment advances and the importance of using MeSH terms in Medline searches. My audience was a score of Latin American colleagues who cover health for their country’s leading print, broadcast, and online media.

In Mexico, I served as co-leader of a two-and-a-half day workshop with Antonio Regalado, a Wall Street Journal biotech reporter. The American-born son of a Spanish father, Regalado has a languid, elegant, Peninsular Castilian, complete with the lisp and the Vosotros second person rarely uttered in the New World. This accent carries the panache and prestige in the Spanish-speaking world that Oxbridge does among us Anglophones. My Spanish, on the other hand, sounded heavily Caribbean, an accent comparable on the sociolinguistic pecking order to, say, the English of south Alabama.

But where there’s a will there’s a way, if not always a perfect command of irregular subjunctives. To my delight, I found that what I had told Luis Botello in my interview was true: my fluency was still lurking in my neurons, just waiting for a chance to re-emerge. Not only could I convey what I wanted to say about evaluating sources, hedging predictions, and other matters—albeit not entirely with the polish I wished—but I understood what my Mexican colleagues said in response.

The Mexico workshop had gone gratifyingly well and won the participants’ overall approval, but some rough spots remained. With some work, the show was ready to take on the road to Santiago.

But Chile presented other, intimidating challenges. First was the unfamiliar, clipped Chilean accent full of vanishing consonants, variable vowels, and words used nowhere else. Second, and even more formidable, my co-leader was Argentinian journalist Valeria Roman, whose native Spanish contrasted with my wobbly professional terminology and verb-tense sequences. A veteran of Boyce Rensberger’s Genetics Boot Camp at MIT and a science and health reporter for the major Buenos Aires daily Clarin, she has a good mastery of English, but graciously deferred to Rob Taylor’s and my need to practice her language as much as possible as we prepared for opening night.

The Chileans greeted it with warmth and enthusiasm. Inhabiting a long, thin, lovely country that they call “end of the world” and the “last place on Earth,” they are extremely welcoming to anyone who happens to stop by. They even told me—though I’m not sure I believe them—that I got all but the most irregular verbs right. And like all Latin Americans, they very much appreciated our efforts to use their language.

Only once before in my professional career has facility in another language come into play. While I was writing the book Dancing Without Music: Deafness in America, Gallaudet College (now University) graciously admitted me to its summer immersion course in Sign Language, usually reserved for new faculty members. There I learned enough to materially aid my research.

But apart from work on deafness, my subsequent health reporting and all of my writing have been in English. I do not write any other languages well enough to offer my prose for pay and, besides, medical science worldwide is reported mostly in English.

A few years ago, a vacation trip to study yet another language did have an indirect influence on an assignment. While in Israel taking an intense course in spoken Hebrew, I stopped by to visit the editors of Jerusalem Report, an international magazine published in the holy city. Its staff of transplanted Brits, Americans, Canadians, and South Africans publish entirely in our Mother Tongue and my piece was just a plain old English article on genetic disease research done at NIH.

Having learned to communicate in a number of languages, I am convinced that temporarily drowning yourself in a new language is the best way to make it your own. Immersion courses take time and commitment and can be emotionally trying, but they truly work wonders. The Israelis routinely use them to take adults from complete ignorance of the Hebrew alphabet to fluent speaking, reading, and writing in under six months. Just a few weeks in a well-designed immersion course can equip an American to communicate—inelegantly, perhaps, but surprisingly effectively. Indo-European languages are much easier for native English-speakers to master. The keys are desire and effort.

But with no guarantee of professional payoff, why bother? In my case, I study languages because I like to. And there are also the smiles on Mexican, Chilean, Swiss, Israeli, or Gallaudet faces as a reward. Latin American health journalism workshops probably won’t be playing a major role in my future finances, but traveling or working in places where I speak to people on their own terms, showing them the respect of making an effort to enter their linguistic, intellectual, and social world, has a richness and resonance that no interpreter can match.

And I never know when another amazing ad will appear on my computer screen, and language will be the key to landing another exciting opportunity.

#

Beryl Lieff Benderly is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Return to NASW homepage.

Return to NASW Members' Lobby.

Return to ScienceWriters Newsletter homepage.