It sounds odd to be having a routine medical procedure carried out with people verifying name, DOB and so on in a non-English context.

In my little part of white America, I overhear Spanish in stores but do not encounter it anywhere else. And languages other than Spanish not at all, though I offered to help an elderly woman the other day who looked lost, only to be told she was from Brazil and didn't speak English.

Not having the advantage of being bi-cultural or bi-lingual I'm not sure how I'd react. I'd almost forgotten my one longer-term experience with another culture.

When I was 17 I spent my last summer before college driving a tractor for a tomato farmer in Eastern Oregon. I lived alone in a barn, cooked on a Coleman stove, bathed and washed clothes in an irrigation ditch and had Saturdays off to walk 4 miles into town and buy groceries. The farmer was Adventist. I ate canned stuff, ravioli and spaghetti mostly, as I didn't have any refrigeration. That and packaged lemonade.

My job was to drive my tractor and trailer out to the fields, drop off empty buckets and pick up full ones which were delivered to a packing operation out by the highway. I started at 6:00AM, had lunch from about 12:30PM to 1:00PM, and dinner after the pickers quit at 3:30PM and I hauled the last buckets in. Then I loaded up the packed tomatoes and hauled them off to a cooler. After all that was done I'd help pack corn, or melons, or some other minor crop the guy produced, and would quit somewhere around midnight. Walk to my barn and start over in the morning. It was brutal, really, but was $1.05 an hour and at 17 I couldn't work in a cannery around machinery.

The farmer was a secretive alcoholic Adventist, and I wound up running the picking crews, determining which fields and who would work where. The pickers were all Mexican who followed crops and worked for the same farmers year after year. I'd start at 6:00AM, set out buckets in the proper fields, they'd come along at 6:30AM and I'd tell them where to go. From then until 3:30PM we worked together, them filling buckets with ripe tomatoes and me driving them around to the packers and back out with buckets. They and I became quite close, teasing and joking, each of us worrying if we'd gone too far, and they'd defend me when Mexicans from a different field would occasionally lob a tomato at me. I think they just enjoyed the excuse for a tomato fight.

I taught the 17 y/o son of the one-armed head of one clan to drive my tractor. You would have thought I'd given him a full-ride to Stanford. The Mexicans would all watch him and silently cheer him on, having to be quiet so that the farmer who hung out just over a hill wouldn't hear. When I had to take back the tractor and he'd go back to picking they'd pat him on the back, laughing, and try to point out some mistake. He was eager but very shy about it, clearly feeling he was overstepping bounds. It had been my idea to teach him. Since they got paid by the hour he didn't lose any money. And while driving he'd help me carry buckets from the field to the trailer.

He got OK with it, considering he didn't drive a car and that tractor was his only experience. With more time driving and shifting he'd be fine. Even so, he now had the credentials to look for a job doing something besides picking, and "my" Mexicans thought I was great. While not a ticket out of the fields it was a ticket up, and at the end of the summer I realized I had done something worthwhile.

At the end of the summer we parted without ceremony, me to return to middle-America, they to continue the cycle of transcient worker housing and field work. I don't think of them much any more, but when I do it's fondly. They were admirable people.