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Often the most memorable language fumbles happen in the midst of stressful situations.

It’s when we have a dire need that a new language somehow doesn’t just roll off the tongue correctly. It can be humiliating, but those fumbles can provide great comic relief that allows us to take a step back and see beyond the heart-pounding moments when something goes terribly wrong in a foreign country.

I will never forget the cold November day that I got a frantic phone call from a dear friend. Her husband, Peter, had been admitted to the hospital of our very poor, post-Soviet country for an emergency appendectomy. I was shocked – he was undergoing surgery as we spoke. They had frantically gone to a local pharmacy and bought vials of anesthesia and antibiotics, as well as IVs, cannulas, and anything else you might need for surgery. The local medical personnel were shocked that he arrived with anesthesia in hand; due to the expense of the medication, typically only children are given general anesthesia, while adults are strapped down, given localized shots and operated on. Peter was a novelty, and you could see the thoughts running through the hospital staff’s minds: “Why in the world would he need that?”
For the next four days Peter and two roommates shared a hospital room so small you could barely walk into the room and turn around. Beds lined the halls for those who didn’t get rooms. Most patients and their guests came peeking into the room to see the Western patient. During those four days, I was one of a few friends – all nurses – who sat with Peter in shifts so that someone was always with him. We administered antibiotics, helped him get up to move around, and generally looked after him. Constant construction noises and the chattering of the spectators provided the ambiance that Peter slept through, his IV in a glass bottle swinging from the bed, his medications piled in the waterless sink.

There was not an advanced piece of medical equipment in the room: no oxygen, no electronics, possibly not even a working outlet. Just three men in three beds crammed so closely in a u-shape that to get out of their own bed they had to pull up their legs and swing them over the head of the man in the next bed.

I observed it all in shock. This was the nicest room in the most advanced hospital in the capital city.

Things Get Interesting

The second day Peter’s health insurance called his wife, Helen. They wanted to inform her that they had found what looked to be a nicer hospital in the city and wanted Peter transferred there. They had called the surgical hospital he was laying in and informed them of this. After some confusion, Helen figured out that they were talking about a new clinic in town, where modern equipment was available for labs and exams, but it was not a hospital.

Helen walked into the hospital to see her husband that day and was immediately accosted by the affronted Medical Director of the hospital demanding to know why she would move her husband. This was after all the best surgical facility in the whole country! Did she have any complaints? Was she not satisfied with her husband’s care? Why would she want to move him?
Sleep-deprived and under enormous stress, Helen sat in the director’s office trying to explain in her new language that it was her insurance company that was mistakenly demanding he be moved. She tried to reassure him and ask that he please allow her husband to stay.
In her flustered state she could not think of the word for insurance. Out of thin air she suddenly remembered it and blurted out what she thought was the word for “insurance.”

Unfortunately the word that she remembered was very close to the word “insurance,” but in fact meant “frying pan.” So, here she was sitting in the Medical Director’s office, so tired she could drop, stressed out of her mind, a small child at home and a husband very sick in a hospital saying to this insulted man:

“No, you don’t understand, it is the frying pan that wants to move him out of your hospital, not me, the frying pan. They think there is a better hospital in town, but I explained to the frying pan that this is the best place for him.”

His face showed he was not impressed. Finally, he gave up, and realizing that this crazy woman was not anyone to reason with he let her go to her husband’s hospital room.

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry

It wasn’t until she had left him that she realized her mistake. After he came home safely from the hospital and was healthy again we were able to sit over tea and laugh about the crazy lady talking about her frying pan.
Sometimes, if we don’t laugh, we cry. Most of all, we know we can live through situations like this only because we are bathed in the prayers of the people back home who have our backs. In spite of our limitations, God is at work along the Silk Road.

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