Viva Lewes Issue #162 March 2020

FEATURE
Vandu Language
Services
Open for communication
When Mebrak Ghebreweldi says that the way to
care for each other is to communicate, she knows
exactly what she’s talking about.
Born one of nine, in the mountains of Eritrea,
Mebrak found herself alone one day in 1999,
pushing a pram up the hill to the county council
offices in Lewes in search of a job. “I came to
England on a scholarship,” she explains, “I studied
for a degree in business and I met my (ex-)husband.”
But things didn’t quite go as planned. “I
felt so guilty. I was supposed to finish my studies
and go back to Eritrea to make a successful life
but now I was a single parent with no work and
two little boys to look after.”
Times were hard, but having, from the age of 16,
been a Morse code operator in Eritrea’s war of
independence (the conflict ran for 30 years and
killed more than 100,000 Eritreans) Mebrak suspected
that if she could make herself understood
in a war zone, she could probably manage Lewes.
“I pushed my pram up to the reception desk and
said ‘I need a job. What jobs do you have?’ The
receptionist asked what skills I had and I said:
‘Well, I can translate.’ And her eyes lit up and
she said ‘Take a seat for a moment.’ Then she
rang her colleague and said ‘We have a translator
in reception.’ Then this woman came down –
her name was Marion Johnson – and she asked if
I was a translator and I said yes, and she rubbed
her hands and said ‘Right. You’re going to set up
a translation and interpreting agency.’ And that
was that!”
During the Bosnian war, Eastbourne and Hastings
were home to many refugees, and social
services were struggling with the language barrier
as well as the great expense of hiring translators
from London. Marion and Mebrak set about
contacting everyone they knew who could speak
another language and within six months they had
30 translators and interpreters working in 16 languages.
“I had one fax machine and one telephone
and I did it all from my dining room. I tell you,”
she says, at the beginning of our interview “fighting
for the freedom of your country is hard. But
running a business on your own when you are a
single parent is harder.”
Vandu Language Services has just celebrated
its 20th birthday. With about 1,500 freelance
translators on their books, their work takes them
into pretty much every area of private, public and
commercial life you can think of. The ongoing
Syrian conflict means that Arabic translators are
especially busy, but Vandu are also working locally
in Russian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Polish, Amharic,
Tigrinya and Vietnamese.
“We are all the same species” says Mebrak. “It
doesn’t take much, we smile, we look each other
in the eye, we say hello, and then we might have a
conversation. That’s what it’s all about. We need,
all of us, to be open for communication.”
Eleanor Knight
St Nicholas Lane, vlslamguages.com
Photo by Eleanor Knight
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