super slow day today. God knows when i need a break!

met sister M from dawn's place, which is a safe house for women victims of domestic/sexual abuse. she brought in one of her clients, N, who is originally from indonesia. she's been in the states for about 10 years but doesn't know much english. she has no identification, no visas, no papers, no money. it seems like she was basically in a slavery situation, traffiked to the states and working for whatever she could get. sister M worked in the middle east for 30 years. so she speaks to N in arabic. sister M told me that N learned arabic while working for an arabic-speaking family. i suspect that maybe a lot of indonesians pick up arabic also from the large muslim population in indonesia. not that muslims = arabs, but there is a belief that to really know the koran is to know it in arabic.

then ensues an onslaught of discussion amongst the coworkers about belief systems, the continuum of fundamentalism to non-fundamentalism (?), and faith around the world. i love talking with my coworkers. hehe.

anyway, it made my day that sister M is french, from bretagne/brittany. and my french speaking came back, miraculously. it just sorta flowed, but then there were some points when i wasn't exactly conscious of what language was coming out of my mouth. dental french is a different story, and i think i should just look up all the vocab so i can communicate in my field better.

N will essentially need all her teeth out and finally some dentures. i still feel very much like a novice with these types of complicated cases. but, maybe something different that i can offer is prayer for my patients and their caregivers. :/

later i was telling taina that N probably speaks bahasa indonesia. and she got really excited, the smartphone addict that she is, and looked up youtube videos to hear what the language sounds like. and because she is goofy, she was thinking in retrospect, "omg! we totally should have played these videos for her!"
my initial reaction was that would have scared the patient away. on second thought, maybe it would have been nice for her to hear her mother tongue, because she probably doesn't encounter it frequently anymore.

i, of course, love to hear taiwanese. recent discovery in december was that the owner of ray's cafe down the street is taiwanese and her name is grace and they close on sundays.