U.S. Official Language?

[Tink]

Angie, it's not that I don't care. I've worked in a bank where we had several Mexican immigrants as customers and we did help as much as we could. I've also worked on an ambulance service and know how essential it is to be able to understand what a patient is trying to tell you. My Spanish is very limited, and most of my co-workers didn't know any. Can you imagine how this limited our ability to even fill out the most basic of forms in the bank? Being a small branch, we had only 3 people in house most of the time. There's no way they were going to hire a full time translator to help us.

Ambulance attendants here are on call from their homes as it is. They receive $2 an hr while on call and a set amount per call they respond to. They're volunteers, so get very little compensation. They are however held to the same standards as the professionals in bigger cities, which means if they screw up they'll be sued like anyone else. SO these people don't do the job for the money... they do it to be of service to the community. Many have quit because the risk of them being sued is so high that they can't justify putting their families in that position. If one non-english speaking patient can't get across to the EMT that they're diabetic, or are having an allergic reaction, etc... someone could die and the small struggling municipal service and the individual EMT could be financially devastated. What happens when we don't have ANY service for any of us as a result?

How is that fair? It's really not so cut and dry as you might think. We have welcomed them into our community, but we simply don't have the resources to provide interpreters on all levels for their safety or ours.