The Asylum Interview

There are few linguistic assignments that are as emotionally charged as interpreting in the asylum office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. During the dozens of asylum interviews I have interpreted, I felt myself each time a witness to life-altering events, transported from the modern luxuries of Chicago to places in Africa where political affiliations can be death sentences, and ancestry determines fate.

The Chicago asylum office just recently moved to new digs. The waiting area is more spacious but more sterile. Gone are the pink painted walls, the plastic potted palm and the box of toys in the corner to keep the kids entertained. The security measures are more sophisticated as well, with an airport-style conveyor belt for scanning bags and a walk-through body scanner. They are manned by the same security guard who, previously stationed in the hallway outside the old offices, would pass the hand-held detector under our raised arms and down into ladies’ handbags.

First, the asylum applicant must show the mailed invitation form, then have fingerprints recorded and a picture taken at a reception desk. Right from the get-go, I see my client’s anxiety level rising. Many of my applicants must have endured a similar processing with imprisonment, and this administrative formality seems to trigger an innate fear of Government, even when it is not their own.

Next, when our number is called – anonymously, like at the Customer Service desk at Wal-Mart - we are escorted into the office where the “non adversarial” interview is to take place. Our identification papers (the applicant’s passport, my Illinois driver’s license) are taken for photocopying. We are asked to stand and swear an oath as to the truthfulness of our statements and the accuracy of my translation.

The asylum applicant and I sit side by side before the large desk of the interviewing officer. The desks are all the same: cherry wood – as if George Washington’s cherry tree is to be commemorated in all administrative furnishings. The polished desktop is nearly bare, except for the applicant’s file, a computer screen and keyboard. The interviewing offices seem intentionally denuded of any personal touch, as if by Official Memo: no photos, no knick-knacks. There is an intentional anonymity to the whole scenario, despite the intensely personal event about to take place. Some asylum officers even forego the computer and take all their notes in longhand, which seems to add to the tense drama of the moment.

The applicant is told that the interview will remain completely confidential and that no information can be communicated back to the home country. This declaration is universally met with some emotion: either a sigh of relief or a look of suspicion.

The applicant’s past and fears are examined here, in detail. Some interviews last more than three hours. One applicant I assisted was done in fifteen minutes, having neglected to file for asylum within the twelve month deadline following her arrival in the U.S. Working as a French-English interpreter, my asylum applicants are all African. For a while, my business card was making regular rounds in Ohio, of all places, among refugees from Niger. I eventually assisted enough interviewees to recognize differences between Hausa, Zarma and Tuareg tribal members. I was surprised the day I saw the name “Touareg” in gleaming metal on the rear end of a new Volkswagen crossover. Did the suburban Mom at the wheel, with her tribe of children strapped into the car seats in the back, realize that her vehicle bears the name of a once-wandering matriarchal people whose lives are forever changed by drought, violence and mining in the desert?

Few asylum applicants have the means to engage an attorney. Just filling out Form I-589 (Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal) is a challenge that many applicants often take on with the shaky help of a local countryman, perhaps someone they met in their neighborhood, possessing uncertain mastery of English. The first part of the asylum interview is devoted to reviewing the responses on the I-589. Like a school teacher, the officer breaks out a red pen and begins correcting the responses on the form. I have told my client before the interview that this is normal, that no one gets it right on the first attempt, and any changes made do not impact the decision of the office. I don’t think, however, that I always convince them.

All interviews almost always begin with confusion about even the most basic question of “what is your name?” Only in the States do we give our first name when asked that question. The rest of the world responds with a surname, and then offers a given name as a second option. I have never heard an officer ask directly “What is your family name?” which would resolve the problem.

Although I never meet my asylum client until as little as a half-hour before the interview, I try to provide some simple coaching in that time.

I emphasize strongly to the applicant to “ONLY answer the question you are asked!” The interviewer has a sequence of events to explore and verify and it is unproductive to unwittingly wander off of the subject. Despite my counseling, the applicant invariably will take off on a tangent that subsequently inspires a whole new line of questioning. This is often the result of heavy emotion and/or lack of education. I try to make it simple by using this example:

“If the officer asks you: do you own a dog? You can answer: yes. If you answer: yes, I have a poodle – you are still OK. But if you answer : yes, I own a dog and a cat and I have a giraffe in my back yard and the neighbors complain that he eats all the leaves off of their lilac bushes… Then you have opened up a whole new set of issues that you are going to have to explain.”

So many times during interviews, I have had the urge to fake a cough or a sneeze that sounds like “geerrraffffe” to bring the applicant back to respecting the line of questioning of the officer.

Another huge problem is the correct recollection of dates. Applicants frequently get all sorts of important dates wrong: the date of their wedding, the date of hospitalization for torture injuries, the dates of their arrival in the U.S., the dates of the birth of their children, the dates they enrolled in school… all seemingly critical to proving the credibility of their case. And yet, I think the human mind intentionally obscures memories under duress. I never seem to remember the date my divorce was finalized. Furthermore, many cultures don’t live fixated to a clock and a calendar with the intensity we do. I get the impression that not knowing the date of your marriage somehow trivializes the union. But in many places in Africa, the date is debatable because marriage is often celebrated by custom first and by civil ceremony later.

I have worked with asylum seekers who had been taken from their homes in the night, beaten and tortured for political opposition to the government in power. I have heard of gang rapes and horrendous prison conditions. I interpreted for a soldier who would not follow orders to participate in a genocide operation. He was tortured by being hung by his feet in his cell. I have translated the tearful trembling voices of women escaping female excision at the hands of their own family members. And universally, religion seems to be a reason to maim and to kill, to seize property and liberty. If I did nothing but asylum cases, I would surely develop a bitter, pessimistic view of the human race. Mankind remains medievally stupid in a scientific, technological age.

Enough asylum applicants opt to employ “my brother’s friend Hassan” as an interpreter so that, for the past couple of years, the asylum office has needed to remedy the situation by dialing up an on-line language service to listen to the interpretation being performed, as a check for accuracy. I’m extremely proud to say that I have not been corrected to date, and have even been congratulated by one asylum officer, who must have had to break up more than one linguistic battle between interpreters. It is additionally stressful to be professionally monitored in the rendering of the translation of a victim’s torture and persecution. Such a situation is not for the linguistically faint of heart or vocabulary.

I have met many fascinating, brave, heartbreaking and inspiring personalities during my work on asylum cases. I was present when one young woman was given the news that she had been granted asylum. She ran a dozen laps of the reception area, non-stop, her arms over her head. I took her to breakfast after that, to celebrate over French toast, and to possibly keep her from fainting.

My North African soldier who went AWOL during the genocide mission was quite memorable as well. Small in stature with elegant, handsome features, he looked as if he should be in a movie charging across the desert on an Arabian horse, brandishing a sword. He chatted blithely with me in the waiting room, clearly happy to be speaking French with someone. After fifteen minutes of our exchange, a corpulent black woman who had been sitting across from us, easily twice his size, stuffed into bright pink sweats and men’s athletic shoes, suddenly pryed herself loose from her chair, spewing profanities, swinging her weighty handbag in a deadly arc near our heads as she strode towards the exit. To my surprise, the little soldier chased after her, pleading “Chérie, come back…!” I had no idea she was his Significant Other. We had not been introducted. A more unlikely physical pair could not be imagined. Apparently I had, in speaking a foreign language, made her jealous!

I have had clients for whom I was fairly sure the outcome would be denial of asylum. Their stories sounded concocted, or they brought piles of press clippings to emphasize how bad conditions are back home. I always tell them that this interview is about their own personal situation, that the U.S. cannot take in whole populations because they are not represented, or persecuted. The applicant has to make his own case. I tell them that a critical question will be “if your mother and sister and brother are still living back in your country, without fear, why can you not go back?”

Many times, as a freelancer, I hear the comment, from family and friends, that maybe a real job will come along for me some day, with the corporate desk, hours and benefits. I don’t do asylum interviews because they are lucrative. However, I do have a teak elephant on my desk, an ever-present reminder from a grateful new American citizen. I have also been “unofficially” declared Togolese by a group in Chicago for whom I did some pro bono work. I have had my hand kissed by an attorney and have received blessings on “my children and my children’s children”, and even the odd, offhand proposal of marriage in the elevator. Mostly, asylum work makes me grateful for what I have and reminds me why it’s important to be bilingual.

I do love my job.

Holy Moses! It's International Translator's Day!

With my apologies to any Biblical scholars out there, I’d like to take a moment to pay tribute to St. Jerome, the Patron Saint of translators, on this, his Feast Day.

(I believe the “feast” here means that it’s his holiday… not necessarily an occasion to break out the pots and pans and cook something special… What does one eat to celebrate the Patron Saint of translators? We were not put on this earth to “eat our words…”)

As I understand it, Jerome was a rich kid from Rome, with records showing that he was baptized there in 365 A.D. Contrary to the tradition of when I was baptized as an unwitting babe in arms, Jerome must have been older when he was splashed with the holy water, because less than ten years later, in 373, he had a major falling out with his wealthy parents and took off to live as a hermit in the desert in Syria. Somewhere along the line, he learned Hebrew and became ordained as a priest.

After hanging out in the desert for almost ten years, Jerome apparently had enough of sand and isolation and came back home to Rome where Pope Damascus took him on as his personal secretary and asked him for the simple task of producing the Official Latin Translation of the Bible.

Jerome seems to have been, for a priest, somewhat of a non-conformist, because he didn’t hang around the Pope too long, and took off for Palestine. Unlike Interpreters, who are typically a gregarious lot, Translators tend to be a bit introverted. I could easily imagine St. Jerome in current times, hunched over a keyboard in his pajamas late into the day, not answering the phone, hunting for the perfect word…

Jerome seems to have had a violent nature, being uncompromising and inflexible. There’s a great story about how he befriended a lion in the desert, removing a thorn from the lion’s paw. The happy cat followed Jerome around like a puppy thereafter. Nevertheless, when the monastery’s donkey went missing (actually donkey-napped by a wandering bunch of Bedouins), Jerome accused his leonine friend of making lunch out of the poor beast of burden. When the donkey turned up later, the lion apparently died of grief for having fallen from the good graces of his master. So much for saintly compassion…

Anyway, the quality that makes the Saints so attractive is their very human nature and how they overcome it. St. Jerome spent the last thirty years of his life in a monastery wrestling with translating Hebrew into Latin. His translation got major recognition by the Council of Trent in the mid 1500’s. How cool to be outlived by a translation!

But for me, the real appeal of St. Jerome is again that marvelously human flaw. St. Jerome, our Patron Saint, gave us one of the best translation errors in history.

Take a look at Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. The man has horns! Thanks to St. Jerome.

This image comes from a mistranslation by St. Jerome of the Hebrew word “qaran” in Exodus. As translators know full well, one word can have several, often conflicting, meanings. “Qaran” is derived from a noun meaning “horn”. Our buddy Jerome took the basic meaning of the word and neglected its derived meaning of “to emit rays”. Moses’ head was supposed to be shining.

As a result of Jerome’s translation, there are images all over Europe, in stained glass church windows and drawings, of a goat-like Moses.

So today, we translators celebrate a great man, St. Jerome, who devoted his life to translating the major text of his time. He was canonized for his work. His motto was “Non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensum” which means “to express not word by word, but meaning by meaning.”

As we translators live with the gentle clicking of our keyboards in the quiet isolation of our offices, let’s pay homage to our Patron Saint who was not perfect in his work, but who gave it everything he had.

Let them eat cake...

All stretch limos have a passenger bay like a cheap scaled-down version of a Hugh Hefner Sixties’ apartment, with strips of changing colored lights in the ceiling, sculpted undulating black leather seating and a wet bar shrine of chrome and fake mahogany. Outside the smoked glass windows, cornfields extended over the flat Midwestern horizon like an evenly mowed suburban lawn, guarded by huge stork-like wind turbines whose skinny blades turned lazily facing west where we were headed.

I was travelling with my French clients from one board meeting to the next. They had dressed “décontracté” for the road trip, meaning “minus the tie”. The jackets and dress shirts had not gone away in favor of the American staple of jeans. Still recovering from the previous night’s steakhouse dinner, everyone was quietly digesting corn-fed beef and their private thoughts.

When René put down his Wall Street Journal, I asked him how he was adapting to life in the States. He is now stationed in Chicago.

Through my work, I meet many French citizens who have permanently moved to the Midwest, and I am forever seeking comparative opinions on life on both sides of the Atlantic. The responses I receive always remind me of the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The description of the beast is dependent upon the piece of trunk, tail, ear or hide in the speaker’s grasp. Ask a company director and economics will be the focus.

“Ah, you see, Déborah, in France we have an enormous middle class that we support.”

The use of the first person plural “we” caught my immediate attention. I know he didn’t mean “me.” We’re not looking at the elephant’s toe nails here. From this man’s vantage point, we are sitting squarely upon the elephant’s back, high above the rest.

Americans drool enviously over the six weeks of State mandated vacation in France, 13th month of salary and 35-hour work week. Most of my French interlocutors, however, are management who work many more hours than 35 per week, and who know what costs a single hiring brings to their business, with nearly impossible recourse to separation once the employment contract is signed.

I concurred that salaries are typically much lower in France, but health and retirement issues are covered by social benefits and don’t require major financial planning as in the States.

“Yes, but life is much more expensive in France as well. Everything is so much more expensive.”

Our conversation attracted the attention of the French CFO, who had just finished a call on his cell phone.

“C’est vrai… it’s true. To live “correctement” in France, mettons, you need to earn 20,000 Euros per month.”

Not sure if I had misheard the figure in the hum of the engine and the tires on the road, I repeated it. “Twenty thousand Euros?”

“Well, let’s say fifteen to twenty thousand.”

At the current exchange rate, that’s $250,000 per year.

I would translate “correctement” as “decently, reasonably well.” One needs$250,000 a year to live reasonably well in France.

My client once again modified his position. “I mean, that is the salary you need not to have any worries.”

I felt even more excluded from the “we” that is not the middle class.

We pulled into a roadside stop to allow the French their required smokes and I wandered off alone a bit to feel the gentle June breezes on my face and playing with the hem of my skirt. The view from the back of the elephant had made me dizzy.

I had never heard such an attack on the middle class before. The “house, two cars and a chick in a pot” American Dream. Isn’t the middle class the buffer between rich and poor? Doesn’t a well populated middle class ensure the balance that keeps revolution at bay and the guillotine in the closet?

We piled back into the limo and rolled on to Chicago, past the tiny peeling painted wooden houses of Gary, Indiana and towards the mirrored towers glistening in the sun on the banks of Lake Michigan.

Silent Partners

They wait until called upon, shoulder to shoulder, in a cold military stance. Their jackets are discolored at the well-worn seams.

Last week, I took Henri Goursau (and his twin brother) with me to a factory where I was hired as an interpreter. Fat and compact, they fit into my big purse, even when my laptop is riding along. I always picture them in bib overalls, with a mechanical pencil behind one ear, sometimes wearing a tool belt.

I’ve had the Goursau brothers with me for years. I picked them up at my special little place near Montparnasse, down one of those storefront alleys that lead to a hair salon, a movie theater, a shoe repair place, and an Asian noodle vendor. Turning off of the Boulevard Montparnasse, I follow the little corridor down to my destination. I never go to Paris without coming here… alone, in private, enjoying the personal curious thrill of the hunt, knowing that this place exists for strange treasure seekers like me. Once inside, my eyes will glaze over and I will hand over my credit card, not caring about the total, clutching my new found partners. My only concern is calculating how to get them all on the plane bound for home.

The Maison du Dictionnaire (98, boulevard du Montparnasse) is quieter than a church, and its glass door was once guarded by a big throw-rug of a German shepherd, always sleeping near the entrance.

I picked up two of my legal partners in that same little market. Their modest thin jackets bear little decoration, just the words “principalement juridique”. One English and one French, of course. And, as seasoned French-English translators know, the English side is fatter. We have 30% more words in English than in French, so it takes 30% more French words to say the same things. French is thick with context. My Rodale English Synonym Finder has almost twice the girth of Robert’s French version which has to flesh out Synonymes by adding Contrariétés.

I could take a two week vacation with Girodet and his “Pièges et difficultés de la langue française”. He spends nine pages on how and when to use capital letters, and typically French, only a page and a half on commas. Little pauses, breathers, are secondary to Emphasis and Hierarchy.

Dahl’s Law Dictionary is highbrow reading. I see him in a magistrate’s robes, austere. René Meertens Guide anglais français de la traduction is the most fun you can have with a dictionary, translating into French all the Anglicisms that make simultaneous interpreters choke in the booth. Meertens is a spy in a trench coat, gathering up seemingly untranslatable bits of English and decoding them for French speakers.

I have the original Old Master of picture dictionaries, Oxford-Duden, clad in a heavy plastic cover like a Buick’s owner’s manual. He sits on the shelf next to Le Visuel from Québec, bought on a whim for the gorgeous colors of his illustrations. Next to him is a gift from a client: my Pierre Perret, who sings trade slang to me, from the Plumber (je suis l’plom-bi ééééé, c’est un beau métier) to prostitutes and pimps, bus drivers, priests, dentists and meteorologists. I’m not surprised that thirty whole pages are dedicated to the jargon of café owners and barmen, given French creativity in quenching appetites and thirsts.

I have dozens of little soldiers in my ranks of dictionaries: insurance glossaries, market terminology, French administrative acronyms, architecture, security, social services, wine. My medical dictionaries pout on the end of the shelf for being less frequented. Despite all my reading on the subject, I cannot consider myself qualified to translate medical documents. Nevertheless, these tomes provide the name of a little known disease, or body part. They earned their keep when I translated some autopsies (no risk there…).

All of my beloved partners are there, on my bookshelves, to complement and supplement my bilingual memory. Even as they are gradually supplanted by electronic versions in cyberspace, I still love the weight of them in my hands, the silky smoothness of their pages beneath my fingers, and all the marvelous little annexes that know how to solve the rare grammatical problem, the use of the proper preposition, or a tricky spelling of the imperfect subjunctive.

One night when a raging Chicago thunderstorm took out the power to my home and office, in a yellow puddle of candlelight, I took my first Robert & Collins down from the shelf. His every single page shows signs of having been visited. I had spent hours there, snatching up words as a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. “I will use this one in the future, I will need this one some day.” Let me nibble on it a bit, to get its taste and smell. Just how many meanings does the verb “sentir” have?

I covered my Robert & Collins in a heavy sheet of upholstery plastic to survive the years, and he is the Grand Old Master on my shelf. I own his electronic offspring, always lighting up under my fingertips on my keyboard, but I still love visiting Grand Daddy’s pages. He was my first junkie indulgence. Twenty-five dollars back then was a lot of money to pay for one book! But, just as in my opium den of dictionaries in Paris, the price is not important.

While I am conscious of their gradual obsolescence, nothing electronic can replace them. These books are the map of my memories, the diaries of my linguistic journeys.

Need a "certified" translator?

In the U.S., we license doctors and lawyers, plumbers and electricians. The idea is to protect the general public from uninformed practices of others.

Many countries in Europe and South America have certification procedures in place, to give translators and interpreters a government stamp of approval. The status of “sworn translator” does not exist in the United States. So how does a company find the appropriate translator or interpreter to meet their particular need? In the United States, very often it is the written translation itself that bears a “certification” of accuracy. Translation agencies routinely provide these to their clients, but the end-user of the translation never knows who actually translated their document and what that translator’s qualifications and experiences are. And with Google ramping up its machine translation capabilities, providing “gist” translations that are almost certainly flawed stylistically with subsequent risks to substance, how does the seeker of translation services know what he/she is buying? After all, the reason someone seeks a translation in the first place is that they cannot READ material in the foreign language. The issue of trust here is enormous.

Does “certification” guarantee that a better translation cannot be obtained from a hard-working freelance practitioner in the trenches? In the U.S., we highly value the self-made man, the freelancer being one admirable expression, working without a boss, a cubicle, a break room and a corporate dress code. While a freelancer may enjoy the freedom of working in his own basement in his bathrobe during the hours of his own choosing, he also works without a health plan, retirement benefits and paid vacation. Such dedication to a trade is worthy of recognition, for the sheer audacity of working without a net.

There are various bodies that will "Certify" a translator in the U.S. The American Translators Association brags of its certification exam, telling its members up front that the success rate is less than 20%. This process is comprised of translators evaluating translators, and, as all writing goes, is subjective. How much more valuable than a Certification is word-of-mouth from a satisfied customer: the third party that hires the translator as a subcontractor and continues to do so?

NAJIT, the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, certifies interpreters for courtrooms. But, strangely enough, the only languages for which NAJIT certifies are Spanish, Haitian Creole and (hold on…) Navajo. What do you do if you have a patent infringement case involving a French company?

We sorely lack a reliable means of locating good linguists, and ways to identify the best ones. Yet, if you break your arm, the law or your marriage, you would have to shop around for a lawyer or an orthopedist on the strength of word-of-mouth, and hope that you have chosen the right individual to repair your situation. Likewise for a translator or interpreter.

References, above certification processes, are golden.

Listening too hard

Homo sapiens, living in a highly sophisticated and artificial environment, no longer need an accute auditory sense to survive. We no longer need a keen sense of hearing to detect the brush rustling under the feet of an approaching predator. Our ears don’t rotate like those of a dog or a horse, who can turn their ears in the opposite direction of their eyes, for a nice protective 360˚ scope of the surroundings. We have become much better at tuning out sounds, and even progressively destroying our hearing with repeated assaults by noise that our heads deem pleasant but our eardrums sense as wounding. We gleefully submit ourselves to the rock concert effect of damaging decibels. Listening has been relegated to a destructive recreational activity.

That is, of course, unless you are an interpreter.

In the heat of an interpreting assignment, where I may have to suddenly produce a foreign word I haven’t heard or used in a decade or so, I often find myself becoming so concentrated on listening that I no longer really see what’s going on around me. I’ve discovered that I’m a lip reader. My vision phases out all visual input except the lip movements of the speaker, along with the facial expressions and gestures that add so much unspoken content to French speech.

But there is a particular bump in the road that I have experienced and that I dread, a special disconnect that comes from listening “too hard”.

The first time it happened, I was a student in Europe, invited to the family home of some Parisian friend. I was treated to the classic Sunday dinner, starting at 2:00 in the afternoon and lasting until 10:00 at night. Eight hours at the table. If you are an American reading this, or unfamiliar with the delights of the French table in someone’s home, eight hours would seem either gluttonous or boring, but between the French food, spirits and conversation, it is neither. Contrary to American gatherings around food and alcohol, I have never emerged drunk from being entertained all day at a French table. The meal traditionally starts with an apéritif which, for me and my French girlfriend, is usually a Martini… Not to be confused with the “shaken not stirred” variety from across the channel or the Atlantic. If you order a Martini in France, you will get sweet vermouth on the rocks. An hour later, when we actually move to the table where we will be sitting for the next several hours, the first course emerges from the kitchen. My interpreting assignments frequently finish at a table, where the lip reading becomes complicated with chewing, and I have to explain that the entrée is the first course in French, while it is the main course in the States.

Between lingering over the food and conversation, the five courses of a French meal, like the five acts of a play, are each accompanied with the appropriate wine: the salad following the main course, the cheese being served with the pop of another cork, dessert, coffee and – if the day has been really long – the glass of orange juice just before all the cheek kissing at the door, like a head start on the next day’s breakfast, and the blissful satiated trip back to our homes or hotels and our beds. The food is consumed slowly, lovingly, tenderly irrigated with fruits of the vine.

Equal for me to the gastronomic delights is the conversation. Engaging in this ancient French art as an American is on a par with participating in Olympic games on a foreign shore. I bring my foreigness to the table to engage in the local sport. The jokes and the slang fly. Word games, play on words, and politics make their way into every conversation.

And then, suddenly a disconnect… On that warm spring evening around the table in the little house in Villejuif, I couldn’t translate something. I listened harder and harder.

Papy (the grandfather) was intrigued to have an American at his table, and was anxious to show his knowledge of my culture.

“My favorite actor is an American… What an amazing screen presence, a real man!”

I stare blankly at Papy. “I’m sorry… who?”

Om fray beau ger…

“Surely you know him? Mamie, what was the name of that film, where he plays a detective?”

Papy would come back periodically all evening to the subject of this unknown actor, totally perplexed that a Real American Woman would not know him!

In the course of the evening, we had covered all politics from WWII to the present, Johnny Halliday’s love life and why don’t the French sell records outside of France…? The right time of year to eat oysters, to hunt for mushrooms in all their varieties, family history of past vacations, Robespierre and the French revolution, and my impressions of my solo wanderings through Paris as a college student.

The orange juice had been poured and consumed and my girlfriend Denise and her husband Pierre, who had to go to work the next day, suggested it was time to drive me back to my hotel.

The warmth of the hugs and kisses at the door were cooled by the night air as we crossed through the walled garden towards the street.

Half way towards the gate, in the moonlight on the path between the vegetable garden and the old outhouse, I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks, turned on my heels and threw my arms in the air, exclaiming, to the surprise of Denise and Pierre and his parents who were still on the doorstep outside the kitchen:

“Oh, you mean Humphrey Bogart!!!”

Finally, after hearing “Om fray beau ger” throughout the evening, I finally heard it without the French accent… Humphrey Bogart!

To this day, the family tells the story about how the American shouted “Humphrey Bogart” in the garden at 10:00 at night, and how hard we laughed afterwards. I realized then that my listening is programmable. If I am expecting to hear French, I cannot detect anything English spoken with a French accent. My second language insecurity has me stuck on the wrong side of my internal French-English dictionary.

And so we tell our ears what we will hear, what we expect to hear.

“We’ll always have Paris,” Bogie told Ingrid Berman in Casablanca. And I will always have Paris to remind me to listen with my heart, and thus really hear. As the Fox told Exupéry’s Little Prince: On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. An open heart is essential to hearing and good interpreting.

Hero for Hire

Koffi is his name. It means “born on a Friday.”

In the classic English poem, Friday’s child is “loving and giving”, and so Koffi is indeed a Friday’s child.

He was a nationally recognized athlete in his tiny West African country of Togo, an impoverished sliver of land wedged shoulder to shoulder between Ghana and Benin and clinging to its toehold piece of coastline on the Gulf of Guinea. The beach near Lomé is where Koffi would organize youth sports on the weekend. His story begins there, among the young Togolese who, Koffi tells me, had poor educational opportunities and even poorer job prospects.

After the games on the beach, Koffi would talk with the kids and their parents. They formed a support group to provide the young people with the positive activity of an organized sport, as well as assistance in seeking employment. The organization naturally took an interest in politics. Togo has been under military rule since 1967, under a dictatorship handed down from father to son.

In 1993, Koffi attended a rally in support of a candidate opposing the Eyadema regime. Before the rally could even begin, it was disbanded through military force, resulting in a massacre of hundreds of people. Koffi survived by lying still among the dead bodies until he could return home.

Many Togolese fled to neighboring Benin and Ghana following the bloody outcome of the rally, and yet Koffi remained, faithful to his country, his family and to his belief in democracy. He and his athletic club became more deeply involved in supporting opposition to the military rule of Eyadema. Koffi was arrested on three separate occasions, with others from his political party, imprisoned under unimaginable conditions and subjected to various uses of force and torture before being released. He bears the physical scars of these episodes of political intimidation, but his spirit didn’t crumble. During his final imprisonment, he risked a perilous escape by feigning illness so that he could be transported to a hospital, where security was not as tight.

Koffi knew that he had to flee the country, not only for his own sake, but for the safety of his wife and three children. He crossed the river into Benin at night in a canoe. While he was in Benin, healing from his torture, soldiers broke down the door of his home back in Lomé looking for him. They beat his wife and broke her arm when she would not cooperate, and threatened that her husband was a “dead man.” Over the next weeks, she put her own safety at risk again in arranging a way for Koffi to leave Africa and go to Chicago where her sister lived.

Once in Chicago, Koffi filed for asylum and, at first, had his application denied because his interview was unsuccessful. He didn’t speak English, of course, and came with a precariously bilingual acquaintance as his interpreter. Two Chicago attorneys provided the pro bono assistance to have Koffi’s case heard in Immigration Court, successfully this time.

While Koffi was going through the tedious months of having his asylum status approved, he worked long hours to support himself. Not speaking English at all at first, he would take any work available, such as standing outside of a car wash on the South Side of Chicago, drying off cars for tips. Later, he worked in the kitchen of a restaurant and bussing tables. His goal was to be reunited with his family.

When Koffi's wife and daughter arrived from Africa, I was at O'Hare with a bouquet of flowers and my camera. One of Koffi’s Togolese friends who was present made a speech to recognize my contribution as interpreter. Far greater were the contributions of the law firm who took Koffi’s case, the attorneys who meticulously studied his asylum petition, and the support of Koffi’s friends and family here and abroad. After many months, when the entry visas were obtained, Koffi’s wife sold everything the family possessed in Togo to purchase airline tickets. Koffi’s two sons were able to fly to Chicago through the donations of the attorney who had attained his refugee status. Finally, after many years, the family is together.

Koffi is now 17 years older than when he first organized his youth sports on the beach near Lomé. He is in his fifties now, and if he hadn’t been an athlete, he may not have been able to withstand the tortures, imprisonments and hardships the way he has.

My life is enriched by my friendship with Koffi. His laugh is large and warm, as is his courage and his outlook on life. More than that, there is a Dickensian lesson in extremes here. Koffi’s faith in life and God are more valid to me than anyone’s, because blessings and good fortune are only truly appreciated in contrast with their absence. He is now faced with the same unemployment as many of his fellow American citizens, having been included in a general layoff just before his family arrived. On the surface, he may seem unemployable as well, given his age, his race, and his education. I have written him the strongest letters of recommendation I could, hopefully to open the eyes of a potential employer to see the devoted, hard-working man that Koffi is. And Koffi continues to tell me that all will be well, that he will overcome this setback. I believe him. Through my interpreting work, I have seen many Koffis who have beaten amazing odds to find a better life in America. I’ve come to think that anti-immigrant sentiment is sometimes unconsciously born of resentment that a foreigner can enter the country with limited means and yet maneuver through the system to succeed where native-born Americans have not. If one could put Heart and Determination on a job application, as real tangible assets, Koffi is superiorly qualified.