Don Sensenig spent over 10 years in Vietnam before and during the war, serving as a missionary with the Mennonite Central Committee. After the war, he returned to the United States and would often be asked to act as a translator for refugees and their sponsors who were having trouble with the language barrier.
Don recalled helping one elderly Vietnamese couple at a doctor’s office:
“The sponsors took them to have their physicals to see how dramatic their medical situation was. And apparently the man kept saying he had diabetes. But the doctors examined him and they couldn’t find any sign of it.
So I visited this family and the staff asked me to find out why he kept saying he had diabetes. It turned out that in Vietnamese, the word for diabetes is “sugar in the urine.” Which is what diabetes does. Unfortunately, in Vietnam the word for urine and the word for road are the same word. It’s just like in English we have some words that have two different meanings.
So the man thought the doctor was asking him something different. He didn’t know what diabetes was. He thought they were asking, “Have you ever urinated on the road?” He answered, “Yes!” and kept saying saying “Yes, I have urinated on the road.”
What they were asking was, “Do you have sugar in your urine?”
His wife, when she understood what was going on… normally, older Vietnamese women don’t often laugh much. But at that point, she thought it was pretty funny. We did, too.