Lost in the System

This story is something V was involved in, years ago, back when we lived in New York.  It illustrates some of the issues that can arise, and assumptions that get made, when people live in different cultures.  Another reason I'm writing about it here is because I am very proud of what V was able to do in this situation, by just caring a bit and going a little beyond her job requirement.  I have changed names to obscure the identity of the person involved but the rest is all true. 

V used to work as a supportive employment specialist for a company in New York.  She had a case load of people with a range of mental and sometimes also physical disabilities and worked finding them jobs in the community.  Then she would followup with them for job coaching and development.  (By the way, sometimes I would help her set up at a job site, or be waiting around for her to get off work, which led to people assuming I was one of her clients, which in turn led to some funny situations.) 

One of the clients that was moved over to her case load when she started was "Andrei" who had been living in the US for several years and was originally from the Soviet Union.  He was mentally disabled, only communicated minimally, and was very hard to understand, but he was a reliable worker.  However, he was clearly unhappy, he would often sit and give a big sigh and stare at whatever he was working on.  V wasn't even sure what his complete history was or how he ended up with them.  There was a person in the past that learned some Russian and tried talking with him but it was hard to talk to him even in Russian and some of his phrases were "off" and "awkward" according to the Russian speaker which contributed to his diagnoses of a mental disability.  V took notice and tried getting through to him on her own initiative.  For instance, she bought a Russian phrasebook at the bookstore and used some simple phrases with him to try to speak a little with him in his own language.

Like before, this didn't really progress anywhere.  He had been referred to ESL courses before but it didn't work.  So, V referred him to a different local adult literacy organization that was more one-on-one and used "Rosetta Stone" software to teach English.  Rosetta Stone only uses the language you are learning so, in this case, all of the work is in English; it doesn't make any assumptions about what language(s) you already know. 

In the new program Andrei's English communication started progressing very rapidly.  He was able to talk more and more until one day he came in and asked V why they all kept calling him "Andrei."  Andrei was not his name at all; it was actually Viktor.  Later on after talking some more he asked why they always used to try to talk to him in Russian.  It turns out he is not even from Russia.  He was from a different republic in the USSR, spoke a different language, and only knew some minimal Russian.  He did however take German in school and could communicate in German just fine, but in New York there wasn't anyone around, that he ran into at work, that seemed to understand German.  

Not much longer after this there came the full realization that he did not have any mental disability at all.  He was of perfectly normal intelligence and was trained in a series of technical skills like electronics and machine shop work.  However, since coming to the US he was only given unchallenging jobs that bored him tremendously.  When V last saw him, before we left NY, he was very happy and was promoted to a supervisor position. 

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While we lived in Germany we saw first hand how mistakes, based on assumptions, can creep into a system, especially when you are an outsider.  This ranged from retirement plans to school placements, but even basic, "inarguable" facts were affected.  For example, we had our names, birthdates, even citizenship (V was Venezuelian!) mistakes entered into our records in Germany and once they are in the system it is difficult to impossible to correct these mistakes.  I was told not to worry about it by some other Germans but, when it comes time to collect my German retirement, for example, they use my name and birth-date to identify me in the system.