An ordinary afternoon for Cao Midi, 69, is playing a board game with three of her friends at the Yet Keen Seniors’ Day Centre in Ottawa’s Chinatown. All of them are originally from Southern China, where Cantonese is their first language.

Cao doesn’t speak English at all. Despite this, daily tasks are no problem for her. However, from the time she moved to Ottawa in 1993, she had tried hard to avoid hospitals.

“I just don’t feel comfortable when I don’t speak their language,” Cao says.

Because of this she has not had a regular checkup in nearly 20 years.

The first time Cao saw a Canadian doctor did not happen until 2011 when she had an unbearable drumming noise in her ears. After having gone in to the hospital, she insisted on seeing a Chinese physician. However, the experience of waiting for hours to see the only Chinese-speaking doctor in that hospital encouraged nothing but her fear toward hospitals.

Cao says after that happened, she convinced herself that maybe the best thing to do would be to see a Canadian doctor the next time she went to the hospital. She wanted to be seen faster, but it didn’t exactly work out.

“The nurse is local. I got very nervous when she was measuring my blood pressure,” Cao said. “I was shocked when I saw the result – the upper number was 190.”

Cao says the hospital then prescribed her high blood pressure medicine. “But it wasn’t the real problem,” Cao says. “I measure my blood pressure every day. It’s usually 120, and that scary number never happened to me before. I know I was just too nervous.”

Cao is not the only one to get nervous. Huang Xiufang, 76, Cao’s friend in the seniors’ centre, says the reason she gets nervous is because all she can count on is her luck.

“The first thing I do when I am in a hospital is to look around and spot a Chinese face to help me. Usually my luck works, but it is not ensured,” Huang says. “When I have to depend on myself, I use all my body parts to explain.”

Huang says once she was hospitalized due to a stroke. No matter how inconvenient it was for her to move, she still had to communicate with doctors and nurses by pointing at a board with translations on it.

Both Cao and Huang say it’s not that they don’t have family to help them, but their son and daughter are busy at work most of the time.

They also say although hospitals in Ottawa have interpreters, booking the service is impossible for them when they don’t even know how to call the hospital.

What is worse is that they often go to local clinics where there are no interpreters.

That’s the reason they have to ask for help from volunteers at the seniors’ centre.

Joe Woo, the volunteer coordinator at the centre, says the volunteer’s job sometimes include picking the senior up from their home, visiting the hospital, and send them back home. He says sometimes an entire trip can take a volunteer four hours.

“You can tell that elderly people very much cherish the help,” Woo says. “They are like children. If you tell them that you will pick them up at 7am, usually they are ready and waiting for you one hour in advance.”

Volunteers can solve the problems most of the time, but they can cause troubles, too.

“Once our senior had to go to the hospital because of taking the wrong pill due to a mistranslation,” says Anna Yip, the program coordinator at Yet Keen Seniors’ Day Centre.

That’s why the centre is being very selective when picking volunteers. It’s now required that volunteers have some knowledge of medical vocabulary. “It can be really serious,” Yip says.

The centre now has about 200 seniors coming from the entire city, but only 50 of them speak English. “There is always a need of volunteers for us,” Woo says.

But according to the 2011 census from Statistics Canada, there could be a bigger need in the city for translators.

The data shows that nearly 12,000 people in Ottawa do not speak English or French, and more than 12 per cent of them are older than 65.

For Somerset Ward where most Chinese people live, the percentage for seniors is even higher – more than 20 percent.

“It is a real and urgent problem. It’s time for our province to fix it.” Woo says.