Simmering in the pot for hours, the ginseng root had been filling our apartment with a familiar, bitter and earthy scent, the scent of my grandmother’s faith. She had been constantly stewing, boiling, and simmering traditional herbs in attempts to treat her debilitating dizziness and headaches. My grandfather, whose blood pressure often spiked, reluctantly followed her belief that these herbs held the power to balance their body’s “qi”. They distrusted the cold sterility of Western clinics, the doctors who spoke too quickly, and the medications with long, unpronounceable names with side effects even more detrimental than the illness itself. Unlike Western pharmacology, my grandparents’ medications and tonics were steeped in centuries of tradition and centered around harmony rather than diagnosis. Despite my admiration of their loyalty to traditional remedies, I feared for their health.
After months of my constant pestering, my own fear finally wore down their reluctance, and they warily stepped into our county clinic. While holding their hands as we sat in the waiting room, I felt the paper-thinness of their skin. I was their fifteen-year-old bridge, connecting both the barriers between languages and worlds.
A boy my age sat across the waiting room with his mother, who wore a grey, janitorial uniform. With her weary eyes wincing at the fluorescent lights, she weakly held his hand. The boy softly translated the intake forms from English to Spanish for his mother. When the nurse called, “Maria Gonzalez”, he gently guided his mother forward. The boy explained to the nurse that his mother’s migraines had gotten so bad that cleaning chemicals, which she used every day, made her vomit. I heard him struggle to translate “throbbing”, “sensitivity to light”, and “nausea”. The nurse, obviously pressed for time, quickly dismissed the two, diagnosing the mother’s symptoms as due to stress. The language barrier had rendered her pain invisible, turning a treatable condition into a disabling one.
The boy and his mother’s interaction with the nurse reflected my family’s struggles as well. Although my grandparent’s barrier was cultural and generational, whereas theirs was linguistic and economic, both were walls built around the same castle: adequate healthcare. While some patients suffer from rare, undiagnosable diseases, millions more suffer from a tragically common yet treatable issue: failure to understand. An incurable disease is a mystery of biology, but a cultural or language barrier is a failure of our system’s humanity. What makes it an especially disproportional and unjust obstacle is that it is solvable. My grandparents weren’t outright refusing care; they were seeking a healthcare approach that fit in their worldview. Maria and her son simply couldn’t articulate the nuances of her pain across a linguistic divide. Due to these divides, the healthcare system saw them as non-compliant and difficult patients. However, I saw them as innocent people struggling due to a lack of translation of words, trust, respect, and cultural competence in the harsh healthcare systems.
This issue of miscommunication and mistranslation couldn't be solved using a simple translation app. It required a bridge of empathy and respect, which inspired me to found the “Healthcare Bridge Project”. This student-led initiative was built on three core pillars and would act as a translator and bridge between linguistic and cultural divides. The first pillar involved real translating tools that many healthcare institutions lack, so we recruited multilingual students to volunteer as medical translators in clinics. We also created glossaries for common medical terms and phrases in widely spoken languages such as Mandarin and Spanish. Those glossaries focus on descriptive phrases for sensations that are often lost in translation, such as “throbbing”, “dizziness”, and “numbness.”
But we knew words weren't enough, because my grandparents needed someone to validate their worldview rather than a translator. This inspired the creation of the second pillar: “Cultural Comfort Guides.” We worked with a retired doctor to create this visual guide for clinic waiting rooms. These guides utilize images, diagrams, and concepts that are familiar to a variety of communities. For example, a diagram explaining how blood pressure medication helps with “calming the river of blood” is a concept that resonates with principles of traditional medicine. Therefore it could ease the anxiety of families like mine. The guides also help clinicians by providing them with culturally sensitive questions and encouraging them to ask, “Are you also using any herbal remedies?” This approach avoids dangerous contraindications, and thus building trust instead of creating conflict.
Finally, the third pillar of the Healthcare Bridge Project revolves around community education and workshops. My project's volunteers teach people of all ages in workshops at local community centers every other week. In these workshops, we teach various age groups with separate tactics, all centering around healthcare. Younger family members learn about effective advocacy for their loved ones, while elders learn about Western medical practices in their native language.
The impact and success of my initiative have been measured through small yet profound victories and written in the stories of patients' renewed health and restored dreams. Our team of just thirty volunteers was able to provide translation support for over two hundred appointments in a year. Additionally, the local clinic where my grandparents were once anxious visitors now keeps our Cultural Comfort guides at the front desk. The nurses even report a noticeable drop in missed appointments among the populations we have supported.
My own grandparents, who once doubted Western medical practices, now have a doctor who understands their perspective. The impact that I appreciate most is the happiness and recovery in those I cherish. It is the sight of my grandmother tending to her garden once again without a trace of dizziness. Her smile has returned not as a fleeting or forced gesture, but rather a permanent feature of her improved well-being. It is the sound of my grandparents' laughter at community gatherings, as their social world expanded after the weight of the constant, silent worry for their health lifted from their shoulders. And it is the story of Maria. After our club provided consistent translation for her specialist appointments, she received an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment for her crippling migraines. Freed from the pain that had chained her to a job that had debilitated her health, she was then able to leverage her true passion. Just last month, she opened a small pastry store called “Dulces Sueños” in our neighborhood. Her son, who once translated her pain in a clinic waiting room, now helps her translate recipes with joy. Maria’s journey from a cleaning lady who was left broken by her work to a business owner thriving in her purpose is the most powerful testament to what happens when we remove the barriers to health.
The most rewarding outcome of all is seeing my grandparents, parents, Maria, and her son’s re-engagement with life, showing that honoring a person's culture not only treats illness but also restores the possibility of a life fully lived. Martin Luther King Jr. called health injustice the most shocking and inhumane, because it preys on the vulnerable, isolating people from their own well-being. Our Healthcare Bridge Project testifies to the fact that the ideal solution is not always a new drug, but often, a new depth of understanding. A healthcare system that can not communicate cannot truly care. I have learned from my grandparents’ recovery and Maria’s thriving bakery that meaningful healthcare grows from conversations, trust, and respect. I will continue building, translating, and connecting until the fundamental human right to health is one that everyone can access.