CRANBERRY TWP — When Elana Kriess, a Spanish teacher at Connoquenessing Valley Elementary School, visited El Salvador over spring break, she didn’t expect to meet her grandmother’s look-alike.

Kriess spent five days working with a group of volunteer nurses, doctors and surgeons from Operation Walk, an organization providing joint replacement surgeries for the poor.

As a language interpreter, she translated critical medical information for patients at Hospital Nacional San Rafael in Santa Tecla, and relayed information back to the English-speaking volunteer staff.

Among the patients Kriess spoke with was Susana Cristina Quijano Perez, a woman Kriess said reminded her of her grandmother, who is now deceased.

“I looked at her, and I was like, well — I call my grandmother Nana Betty — ‘You look like my grandmother,’ and I said, ‘Can I take a picture with you?’” Kriess said. “We took a picture, and then I texted my mother and asked my mom to send me a picture of my grandmother, and I showed the patient.”

“She was saying, ‘Maybe I'm the reincarnation of your grandmother,’” Kriess said. “It was so sweet. There were lots of hugs. The people there were just so warm.”

Kriess shared that she remembers Quijano Perez so well because “surgeons had to take extra care to locate the correct-sized knee prosthetics that would fit her.”

“A local surgeon had replaced her other knee years before and the prosthetic was too big so she couldn’t even bend her knee when she walked,” Kriess said.

“(The patients) were so happy to be getting this experience, and to have the surgery,” she said. “A lot of them, they can't walk, so they're either in walkers or wheelchairs or they have a cane. And they've been like that for years.”

Kriess said patients waited days for surgery.

“They had to show up early in the morning, and a lot of them took a bus to get to the hospital — a four-hour bus,” she said. “So they were up through the middle of the night and waiting all day to find out if they were getting surgery. Some had to come back (to the hospital) on a different day. It wasn't easy for them to get to the hospital. I'd say (the patients) are just very resilient people.”

The joint replacement surgeries were performed with local anesthesia, without the use of general anesthesia.

Before and after surgeries, Kriess’ role as an interpreter often extended beyond translating medical information.

“I would talk to the patients and explain to them what the procedure was going to be, distracting them a little bit because they weren't really comfortable medical procedures,” Kriess said. “When I could, I’d keep the family members updated, you know, while their family member was in surgery.”

“I'm a nurturing person,” she said. “So when (patients) came out of surgery, it's scary — they might be in a little bit of pain, and there's doctors and nurses buzzing around them and taking their blood pressure and doing things ... I’m just kind of comforting them and letting them know what’s going on.”

Kriess, of Cranberry Township, said she is usually uncomfortable around medical procedures. As an interpreter in a hospital, she said she had to face her fears.

“I was exposed to things that normally would make me queasy,” she said. “It made me passionate.”

The procedures, Kriess said, were life changing.

“It was a big effect that a simple surgery had on the whole family,” she said. “Someone in their family gets a (knee replacement), and it was a huge thing for the whole family. Someone is able to walk now.”

“A lot of (patients) could not work because of their physical limitations,” Kriess said. “So it meant them being able to go back to work.”

“There was a particular young man; he was very young, he was 33,” she said. “Most of the patients were in their late 60s or 70s; they were older. He couldn't work, and he had a hip replaced.”

While he was recovering from hip replacement surgery, Kriess said she saw the man walk.

“I was just so happy,” she said. “I was hugging him ... it was like night and day from how he was (before) the surgery.”

Kriess, who grew up in Miami surrounded by Cuban-American influences, said her own language-learning education is steeped in Spain. As a teacher, she incorporates vocabulary from Mexico, which is more commonly used in the United States.

Each Hispanic country has its own colloquialisms in Spanish, she said.

Along with brushing up on medical vocabulary to prepare for her trip to El Salvador, Kriess said she also adapted to colloquialisms used in the Central American country.

“In the United States, we tend to kind of group everybody together as Hispanic and they're, you know, very different, unique cultures,” she said.

Previously, Kriess has visited Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Spain. When she travels, she said she likes to bring back materials for her students at Connoquenessing Valley.

“A lot of kids, they don't understand what world travel means,” she said. “They don't understand that another country uses a different kind of money than we do. They don't understand that not everybody speaks English everywhere you go. I'll bring back menus. I'll bring back money. I'll show them pictures. I try to incorporate that a lot into my teaching.”

In El Salvador, she said she and the team of about 50 volunteers were limited to the hospital and hotel. The items she was able to bring back for her students to look at were sparse. But she made sure to take pictures, she said.

“I think, when you travel, you get a better understanding of others’ perspectives, and I think that's what's so important,” she said. “Not everybody can travel. But that's why I try to bring stuff into the classroom to expose. There's other ways to be exposed to other cultures and languages without traveling, but if you can do it, it just kind of opens people's minds.”