When Mike Weathers became a volunteer interpreter at the Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City, he saw it as a chance to keep up with the Spanish he learned on his mission in Peru and to become more familiar with the medical profession. He hopes to enter medical school upon graduation from BYU.

Photo by Julie Dockstader Heaps

One of 35 returned missionaries serving as a volunteer at Primary Children's Medical Center, Mike Weathers, left, interprets for Dr. Craig Hughes, right, and Luis and Yorley Chavez, and 2-year-old David, who don't speak English.

But the 22-year-old has learned so much more than the medical terms he translates for Spanish-speaking parents of sick children.

One day he interpreted for a doctor trying to communicate with a frightened young mother of an infant. "The mother started to cry. Her baby was going to be fine," Mike, a member of the BYU 139th Ward, said at the end of one of his weekly volunteer shifts.

"I love it," he said of the service he's been doing since the first of the year. "It's my favorite thing to do every week. It feels good to give service, to help out families who, without our help, wouldn't be able to communicate with the doctors. It feels good to know you're helping somebody else, especially children."

Lucy Cabal is certainly grateful for Mike Weathers and his co-volunteers. As supervisor of the Language Program, the volunteer interpreter's program for Primary Children's Medical Center, she relies on 38 volunteers — 35 of whom are returned missionaries. Four, like Mike Weathers, make the trek each week from BYU; the other 31 come from the adjacent campus of the University of Utah.

These volunteers help an average of 42 patients per day, Ms. Cabal told the Church News, and serve in every part of the hospital, including the emergency room, and in-patient services and out-patient clinics, and also in facilities outside the hospital, such as rehabilitation centers. They speak several languages, with the majority interpreting Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean and American Sign Language.

Ms. Cabal, a native of Colombia who immigrated in 1981, does not hesitate to laud the contributions returned missionaries make to this program — "a big, huge contribution."

"I've had different states calling me trying to figure out how to start this program. I've realized we have a good advantage [in Utah]. We can find people who are bilingual."

Hospital personnel in other states, she said, "struggle more to install the program because they don't have the bilingual population that we do because of the returned missionaries."

It was even a returned missionary reporter who helped her launch the program in 1995. She was going on vacation for a month and her boss said, "What are we going to do?" At the time, she was the only hospital Spanish interpreter. Before that, the hospital would simply put out announcements for any employee who spoke a particular language to help interpret for a doctor, or hospital workers would call a national paid interpretation service which Ms. Cabal called "impersonal."

With the approval of the hospital and the promise of some grant money from the Primary Children's Foundation, she set out to establish a volunteer program. Her first step was to contact the Daily Utah Chronicle, a student newspaper at the University of Utah. The reporter sent was a Spanish-speaking returned missionary. She sent him to the spina bifida clinic in the hospital to do some interpreting. The result was the "most beautiful, powerful story I have ever read."

The same day his article ran 29 people called the hospital to volunteer. Ms. Cabal went on vacation.

Calling it "an incredible program," Vickie Morgan, director of volunteer services for the hospital, said the interpreter's program has brought Primary Children's Medical Center to the forefront in volunteer services, not only in the state of Utah, but also throughout the nation.

Volunteers in the program are put through stringent requirements. There is a criminal background check, as well as a check of their medical histories. And they must become familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which includes strict privacy laws.

Training includes a month of shadowing the five paid employees of the program as they interpret for doctors and patients. Then the employees shadow new volunteers as they begin interpreting. Every fall and spring, there is an optional lengthy training program called "Bridging the Gap," sponsored by the Cross Cultural Health Care Program based in Seattle, Wash.

All the training, Ms. Cabal emphasized, is to help the volunteer understand that interpreting for doctors and patients focuses on two barriers — linguistic and cultural. In fact, she calls the volunteers "cultural brokers" who help patients not familiar with western medicine gain understanding of how the doctor is trying to help their children and to help doctors understand the traditions and value systems of non-English patients.

"There is communication between the provider and the patient. It is amazing. It's hard to describe the relief on these families' faces. They sometimes cry with happiness."

For Mike Weathers, serving as a volunteer interpreter has only enhanced his desire to become a doctor. He recalled his days as a zone leader in the Peru Trujillo Mission, in which he served from 1999 to 2001, when he took missionaries to the hospital and communicated with the doctors there. Now he helps doctors and patients communicate in Spanish in Salt Lake City.

He wants to do the same with his own patients one day. He said his wife, Kristin, whom he married last April in the Salt Lake Temple, always asks him about his day when he returns from the hospital. Some days, he said, are slower than others.

But on the "days when I interact with people, she knows."

E-mail: julied@desnews.com