The Translator Who Moved In

In 2018, Dr. Sarah Shin left her tenured position at Georgetown University to move into a refugee apartment complex in Clarkston, Georgia — a town sometimes called "the most diverse square mile in America." She spoke fluent Dari, Arabic, and Burmese. She could have translated documents from a comfortable office downtown. Instead, she signed a lease on a two-bedroom unit between a family from Afghanistan and a mother from Myanmar.

Her neighbors had received English pamphlets about their legal rights, their children's school enrollment, their medical options. The words were accurate. But the pages sat untouched on kitchen counters because words on paper cannot answer the question a frightened mother asks at two in the morning when her child's fever won't break.

So Sarah became the word made near. She walked to the bus stop with them. She sat in waiting rooms. She explained what the doctor meant not just in their language but in their experience — "this medicine works like the ginger tea your grandmother made, but stronger."

The information had always existed. But it remained distant, abstract, inaccessible — until someone carried it across the gap in her own body, in her own daily life.