Standing Under

3/14/06

In preparing my Medical Spanish presentation I came a cross a quote: "To understand someone you must stand under them." This in the context of development aid/ health care in developing countries as a reminder to those of us in the white coats, or construction helmets, that to really understand a person different from yourself, it cannot be done from a remove, from the top down as we Americans to do. I loved the imagery of standing under someone, as if looking through a glass floor, up at their world, feeling the weight of their steps and the heat of the sun on their heads, the pebbles under their toes or the incline of a hill to be climbed. So often we look at people through our filters and think, ah yes, this person looks and acts like this, therefore I understand them. Attempting at "cultural competency" it's easy to think that because you've read the hand-outs at a seminar or interviewed a few dozen people or perhaps even lived in their countries, eaten their food, spoken their language, caught their intestinal bugs, that yes, "I get them." The problem lies in the idea of "them" however. The minute you qualify a group of people, you've pre-judged them. Doesnt' mean with mal intent but, by saying Latinas are... you have set up an expectation that this group of people and any single member there of is going to fulfill some pre-conceived idea. Better to think of each person we come across as just that, an individual; to open our eyes, to really listen, to take off the filters and hear, to stand under them and look up into their world as if being born into it from the soil up rather than looking down from a tree top or even at ground level with that stability of pre-conception clouding our view.