Eman Ibraheem spent three days unable to eat, sleep, or talk after she received a call earlier this month from an interpreter who had translated an urgent message from her doctor into Arabic: “You might have an eye tumor; you should see a specialist as soon as possible.”

When she received that call, Ibraheem, a 24-year-old refugee from Syria, had been in the United States for a year. What tore her apart at that moment was not the possibility of having cancer, but what could happen to her four kids—aged between nine and nine months—if something happened to her. “They don’t have anyone but their father and me. How will they manage?” she wondered. “I’m terrified. How can I survive unless I can talk to the doctors? But we struggle to find interpreters.”

This wasn’t the first time Ibraheem had come up against the language barrier. Her husband, Mohannad Abdulrahman, had not been able to find an interpreter to help solve a financial problem he had been struggling with for two months. When Ibraheem learned that she might have a tumor, he felt more helpless than ever. “I saw my wife crying and suffering in fear, and all I was thinking was, ‘How can I find an interpreter to schedule an appointment?’ She was breaking down, and I couldn’t do anything—even just that small part, scheduling an appointment,” he said.

Read the rest of the story by Ahad Rummani at Oakland North.

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