• Child health

Everyone working there, except the pediatrician, spoke two or more languages.

For each young patient, staff would crystallize the medical issue, a terse “chief complaint,”

using the parents' own words, on why they were bothering to see a Western doctor,

even when the children didn't, wouldn't or couldn't complain for themselves.

It's a parent's concern, via a native vernacular, through an interpreter's ear,

twisted with some medical phrasing, a flashing linguistic triple flip,

leaving the doctor to decipher the …