How do language barriers impact refugees and how is Tarjimly solving this problem with the help of thousands of bilingual volunteers?
Hear from Atif Javed, Executive Director of Tarjimly ([ Ссылка ])
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I'd like to get to know you all a little bit. But I'd like to do it by taking you with me to a refugee camp, so we can get to know each other the way refugees do.
How many people have been to a refugee camp? Raise your hand. Not too many. So we have about 400 people in this room right now. Did you know, this is the rough population density of a refugee camp? That's not seating capacity, that's to LIVE in this space. We're about 5x over-capacity, much like a refugee camp. The person to your left will be here for 17 years. The person to your right doesn't even speak the same language as you. In fact, in our camp they speak 30 different native languages. Only 2 of you are humanitarian workers. Through that door, there's an English medic who comes for an hour once every 2 months. There's a Greek attorney that comes once every 4 months. And there's a French psychiatrist that comes once every 12 months. To help all of you. Now out of the 400 people here in this camp, only one of you, just one of you, speaks either English, French, or Greek to translate for those humanitarians to help everyone else.
So how many people have a relative that's a refugee, raise your hand? My hand is raised because my grandmother was a refugee, and she depended on me for years to interpret for her. My family moved to the United States the week after 9/11, so that fear of brown skinned Muslim immigrants was palpable to say the least. But I was a little bit luckier than my grandmother. She used to tell me in Urdu: "at least people will judge you after they hear you instead of just after they see you, like me". In California alone, we have 100,000 refugees and asylees at least, who are struggling to resettle: signing their kids up for school, filing immigration papers, applying for jobs, and now even in detention centers.
So that leads me to my last question to get to know you all: how many people here are bilingual, raise your hand? THAT's how Tarjimly is solving the language problem. Tarjimly is the nonprofit that I started with my friends and it means "translate for me". It's a simple concept and mobile app. We connect bilingual volunteers to translate or interpret for refugees, immigrants in need, and humanitarians.
Tarjimly Translators were there for a Syrian father who needed to tell the doctor his child was allergic to penicillin. A Tarjimly Translator was there for a Congolese woman in the Bay Area who waited months for her asylum interview only to find out day-of that her interpreter was unavailable. And this month, a Tarjimly Translator was there for a Guatemalan asylum seeker IN a detention center to tell their story to the attorney filing their case. Each of these volunteers were half way across the world when they picked up the call to help right on their phone. And there are 13,000 stories like these on Tarjimly.
I think in some ways our society is crippled by the scale of these problems. We see problems that are presented as insurmountable global catastrophes, which makes us ask, can I have any real impact? Instead of thinking about some grand action of change, we can have a BIG impact by just doing something small with **our** skills: hosting a family, going and voting, or translating on the phone. I believe that it’s a human right to be heard and understood. And that’s the small action I'm taking. Thank you.
