Nadeen Eliyan, MS ’22
Bay Area native Nadeen Eliyan grew up spending summers visiting extended family in Palestine. When she signed up for Columbia Nursing’s program at the University of Jordan in Amman, she hoped to hone her already-fluent Arabic and learn more about how the language is used in medicine.
We were there during the month of Ramadan and Eid. We worked with the master’s students there, and it was special to feel this togetherness—we’re learning together, we’re fasting together. They took us under their wings, inviting us to dinners, inviting us to the other hospitals that they worked at. Learning beside them was really, really awesome. The depth of knowledge that they had was admirable.
I consider myself quite fluent in Arabic, but when you’re thrown in there and that’s all they’re speaking, you realize, “Oh, wow. I don’t know as much as I thought I did and there are limits.” As the translator for my peers, I was trying to translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English, but a lot of these things don’t have direct translations, or I just didn’t know the direct translation. So that was also a tricky spot to be in and added another layer.
I did my best in trying to translate not just language, but also cultural values. I felt like I took on a special role of trying to explain a lot to each side, which was interesting for me. And it was challenging for me at times to feel like I had that weight of being in this role for both parties.
One of my main goals in participating in the global experience was to see health care from a non-Western perspective, and how culture influences health care. Throughout this experience, I was reminded to always go into things with an open mind, always ask and not assume, always really try to understand somebody’s cultural values before you make broadening assumptions, because people’s ideas and health literacy and how they interact with their own health care experience—all of that is so greatly influenced by culture.
Read the full article here.
