I’ve not been on this forum for the last three months or on Social Media period, as I have been working as a Health Care Support Worker in a local hospital on a special Covid-19 contract. It was hard hard work and lon long hours. I really could do no more than three months, it completely exhausted me.
I was lucky in that about half the staff were first language Cymraeg speakers and a fair few of the patients. The Welsh speaking patients were hard work, but so rewarding. Hard work because they generally had some form of dementia, often thick Ceredigion accents too?
“Go lew?” This stumped me for a while, but it’s a local variant on ‘Chi’n iawn?’
The most wonderful part of this was that language choice really made a difference. There were some patients, who didn’t seem to grasp what you were saying in English and often said very little. However when I switched to Welsh suddenly there was much more both way understanding.
It was difficult being understood. Maybe my Welsh is a bit formal, but communicating wearing a mask really didn’t help, but that was a clinical necessity.
We also had patients who language switched like crazy, I wasn’t convinced they knew which language they were using. I probably should look up if there have been any studies on language use in bilingual dementia patients…
Another difficulty I had was with vocab. Uwd is porridge, but to some first language speakers, uwd draws a blank, they use porridge. It’s difficult for a learner to stop using a known word and resort to the English one, especially mid-sentence. It’s so sad, you can see it in people’s eyes when sometimes you sense they feel guilty that you are using a Welsh word they don’t use, or maybe it was somethign else, it’s very hard to tell what is going on in the minds of dementia patients anyway.
It was hard work and having to make language choices and switch made it harder at times, especially when working with non-Welsh speaking staff. However being bilingual definitely helped, especially when we were in a situation where visitors were not allowed. It was so painful to see relatives drop off clean clothes outside the door for us to fetch, often having driven miles and not even get to see their father/mother/brother/sister, though every ward now has a tablet to allow friends and family to Skype/Zoom.
If anyone is in hospital in Wales for any reason, all Welsh speaking staff will have the Orange semi-colon on their uniform if they use their Welsh at work.
Basically, all that being said, it was terrific to be able to use Cymraeg at work.