Amber Grace of LenguaPro teaches a Spanish class for Grapevine firefighters. Spanish language classes have been on the department wish list for some time. A $5,000 budget allocation paid for the instruction.
Being able to say "Calm down," "Breathe deeply" or "Where does it hurt?" is a good starting place to deal with injured or endangered people.
But until recently, it was hard for many Grapevine firefighters -- who also are paramedics -- to convey those messages to people who do not speak English.
Now, because of a class designed to teach Spanish with an emphasis on emergency communication, that has changed. This week, about 40 firefighters finished an 11-week session of Spanish classes.
The classes, which met three hours weekly, were conducted by LenguaPro of Colleyville.
"We've got a growing number of people in the area that don't speak English," said Mark Ashmead, the division chief in charge of training for Grapevine Fire Department. "And we not only wanted the firefighters to be able to ask questions, but we also wanted them to be able to understand the answers."
According to the 2000 Census, 14.5 percent of Grapevine residents, or 5,647 people, speak a language other than English at home. Of those, 4,199 speak Spanish.
Spanish language classes have been on the department wish list for some time, Ashmead said.
A $5,000 budget allocation paid for the instruction, and a few Grapevine police officers and Southlake firefighters also took the class.
Grapevine firefighter Jerihmy Dalton of Watauga said learning to say "Yo soy bombero" -- "I am a firefighter" -- has helped him reassure fearful victims who speak only Spanish.
Patty Hodge, who teaches Spanish and is co-owner of LenguaPro, said that is because "sometimes, Spanish-speaking people come from a country where people in uniform abuse their authority."
A police officer who works with a drug-sniffing dog learned how to tell Spanish-speaking people that the dog will not hurt them, Hodge said.
Some key sentences students learned are "Respire profundo" ("Breathe deeply") and "Salgense del edificio" ("Leave the building"), Hodge said.
She said she led the firefighters in pronunciation drills and brought in a friend from Costa Rica who spoke Spanish to the group for nearly two hours.
"The firefighters were surprised how much they understood," Hodge said.
Firefighter Steve Edwards of Trophy Club said he has used what he learned in class several times.
"Every class, we did a scenario like asking about medical history. We also learned to ask people to speak more slowly," he said. "People are more at ease now, better able to describe their injuries" if a cause is not obvious.
Until now, "it was hard to do anything other than just take them to the hospital," Dalton said.
Hodge said students were relieved that the class did not stress grammar.
"Communication -- not perfect Spanish -- is our goal," she said.
Said Dalton: "We may not have the spelling nailed down, but people will get the gist of what we say."
