Brooke Tipton: Initiative Leads to Failure Leads to Success

By July 2020, I had become quite proficient at several things new to me: Internship applications, Zoom, teaching ESOL, matching face masks to my outfits…the list could lengthen.  Therefore, it seemed fitting for me to volunteer for new projects whenever a supervisor would express a need.  I’d soon decide that I was wrong.

All these new experiences were connected to my summer 2020 Adult Education internship with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Atlanta.  I wasn’t in Atlanta, of course.  I was in my sunroom wearing pajama pants outside of Zoom’s range of vision.  The interns and most of the workers were online as a safety measure due to the pandemic.

Anyways, the main task of this internship was to assist with or lead class several times a week on ESOL and American Culture for asylees (immigrants who are not yet on a Visa process but have been granted legal asylum in the USA).  There were some uncomfortable moments, like the time I had to get through the entire lengthy safety lesson and my students acted like they just wanted to dip out and sleep, but it was okay because I usually had other teachers there to back me up.

But I was on my own when it came to calling potential clients via Google Voice to collect their information.  Again, I had experienced several new things at this point.  Within this internship, creating supplementary educational videos on YouTube went smoothly, and calling to help asylees fill out their Census forms wasn’t terrible save some awkward phone tag.  My hand (well, email reply) went up like a firework at the opportunity to recruit these asylees, confident it couldn’t be bad.

I phoned several people on the list I was given.  Many did not answer.  A few stated that they were interested but were working, so I gave them my Google Voice number so they could call back.  And then came Jesica.

On the chart I was using to call people, there was a note on Jesica’s row that she wasn’t able to speak any English.  But she was the perfect client to be in this predicament, I thought.  This was because her native language was Spanish, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to use my Spanish with a native speaker in a work setting since Summer 2018.  To get the information I needed from her, the IRC had a list of standard questions for me to ask.  All I had to do was look up a few words to translate the questions into Spanish before I called Jesica, and I would be able to provide extra information and listen as needed.  I was confident when I sent my supervisor Emily an email asking to conduct this interview in Spanish, and she was enthusiastic about my ability in return.

Wow, was my bubble burst.  Almost immediately after calling and introducing myself to Jesica, I realized I was in over my head.  She started to speak back to me with a seemingly lovely personality, but an uber thick accent.  Trying to make out what she was saying was like trying to tell one Rainbow Tetra in my home aquarium from the next.  Nearly impossible.

I wrote down what I could.  From the get-go I felt the questions I was given to ask were a little excessive, but now they were the banes of my existence.  The biggest pain was asking for the names of each of her children.  She had about five children with varied names that were far more difficult to me than her own.  I wrote down the names of three of them, but they must have come out on my paper like the auditory end of a childhood telephone game.  I got half of her address, which is helpful for nothing.  Several other mishaps ensued.

This is why it was completely understandable that this talkative lady simply said, “No,” when I asked for her social security number.  I was a random person on the phone who didn’t even have the skills to understand her—she wasn’t going to divulge the most secretive line on her records.  I wouldn’t have if I was in her shoes.  Even if Jesica obliged to give me the number, it wouldn’t have been correctly understood.

When I reached the end of the questionnaire in my mentally beat state of being, I thanked her for the interview and was able to tell that she thanked me for dealing with her accent.  Her accent, by the way, hailed from the Dominican Republic.  I Googled this after our interview in hopes of finding consolation and it worked.  The people of Quora informed readers that Dominicans are known to have one of the heaviest and hardest Spanish accents for Americans to understand.  Jesica’s dialogue was a far cry from the accents native to Mexico and Spain I had previously interacted with.  And that’s a beautiful thing, especially since she’ll be contributing her culture to this melting pot we call America.  I just wasn’t equipped to work with it.

Defeated, I sent an email to Emily explaining my failure.  Her response was polite, but also short, seemingly conveying disappointment.  Someone must have called to properly collect information from Jesica after that, but I don’t know who.  And I never worked with potential client calls again. 

During and after my internship, I saw that moment as a failure.  It didn’t constantly weigh on my mind, but it was an unpleasant memory, nonetheless.  It wasn’t until I was writing a paper for my reflection seminar that I began to think, “Good for me”.

My mentality experienced a total paradigm shift.  Yes, my initiative crashed and burned.  But at least I took the initiative.  That whole summer I’d been stepping forward while other interns faded in the background.  And I realized that an ambitious worker is going to encounter difficulty on their path of growth.  I won’t let experiences like this hold me back and I know I will encounter experiences like this again.

The application process to get this internship, the teaching experience, the projects, the disparity between this type of work and what I wanted to do post-grad, and this catastrophe with Jesica have all combined to give me that much more resilience and drive.  Was every day perfect?  No.  Have I realized that my sense of Spanish ability was totally inflated?  Yes.  But I’m grateful to have this imperfect experience under my belt and the knowledge I accumulated through the introspection that followed.

Brooke Tipton is a senior sociology major graduating in May 2021.  Her breakaway was spent as a remote Adult Education Intern with the International Rescue Committee in Atlanta and completed by presenting a poster on volunteerism at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.  After graduation, she plans on moving overseas for two years as a humanitarian worker.