Talking about your health and in your language: Intercultural Communication Management, Ixchel's task

Can you imagine arriving at a public health hospital and not being able to express your pain or discomfort to the medical staff? When we talk about access to healthcare, we think of hospitals, doctors, medicines and diagnostics. But we rarely think about something as basic and fundamental as communication. What happens when a person cannot explain their symptoms in their native language? When they do not understand what the medical staff is telling them? When their understanding of health and illness is ignored or minimized?

This is where the work of Ixchel's team begins, accompaniment in health, and where the management of intercultural communication makes sense.

In multicultural contexts such as Chiapas, where dozens of people speaking different indigenous languages and with diverse worldviews coexist, Ixchel promotes a model that places mutual understanding, respect and dignity at the center.

Through community interpreters, Ixchel accompanies indigenous people in public hospitals, allowing them to express their feelings, understand their diagnoses and actively participate in decisions about their health. They are also the bridge for people to continue their treatment and keep their medical appointments.

But this accompaniment goes beyond simple translation or interpretation. It is a true intercultural mediation: Ixchel's interpreters not only translate words from Tseltal, Tsotsil or Tojol-Ab'al into Spanish. They also translate contexts, ways of seeing the body, conceptions of pain, care, life and death. They make understandable what is often ignored in institutional health services: that each culture has its own way of healing and getting sick, that we have different worldviews.

This work is a clear example of what it means to manage intercultural communication: creating conditions for dialogue between cultures, guaranteeing the right to be cared for in one's own language, and making the health system a truly inclusive space, where diversity is not an obstacle, but a richness that is respected and integrated.