December 3, 1999
Dental school coordinator receives international poetry honor
The jurors had been in the room for five hours. That was an unusually long time, particularly for the Heide Kurier photographer waiting to take the picture of them when they emerged. But the wait was worth it. Not only did the North German newspaper have the picture of the jurors, but it was able to announce that the Freudenthal Prize for Literature in the Low Saxon Language had gone to someone abroad for the first time in 42 years.
It had gone to a program coordinator in the University of Washington School of Dentistry.
Reinhard “Ron” Hahn works in both the Dental Hygiene Program and the Department of Dental Public Health Sciences. Hahn says that his poetry is a way of unleashing a part of his personality that is not expressed in his job, where he must keep others organized and be organized himself.
The Award of the Freudenthal Association of Salta/Soltau in the North German state of Lower Saxony carries both the prestige of publication and an award of 5,000 Deutsche Marks, or roughly $2,700. The reason the jurors were in the room so long is that they emerged with a tie. Hahn doesn’t mind, because he’s in good company. The other winner is an 80-year-old man whose life’s work is being collected by the University of Oldenburg.
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate Hahn on winning an award for writing in German. That’s like referring to Scots as “English,” or to Catalan, Galician and Aragonese as “Spanish.” Low Saxon is not German. Its ancestor, Old Saxon, is a language that people who spoke Old English seem to have understood quite easily. It was the international language of the Hanseatic Trading League, an influential alliance of port cities from the 13th to 16th centuries.
In North German cities, people who speak Low Saxon have an image as hicks that U.S. residents would associate with the characters in “The Dukes of Hazzard” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.” When Hahn was growing up, Low Saxon was usually spoken in private, and in defiance of social disapproval. But more and more people are now viewing this historic language with regional pride. Low Saxon today is in something of a renaissance. It’s now almost fashionable to learn it, and it’s still spoken in the country. Hahn has carried around his love of the language on a series of globetrotting travels that have seen him through stays in, among other places, Australia, Israel, Japan, China and Central Asia.
This global background is not normally something you expect in a dental program coordinator, but the School of Dentistry has taken advantage of it. Hahn co-teaches the “Global Perspectives” class for dental hygiene students with the program director, Norma Wells.
The students learn, for example, that in some cultures, it does not work to tell a child directly about dental health. In some cultures, you tell the mother. In others, you tell the father or another relative.
“I try to convey that everything they say is culturally based,” Hahn says. “I’m trying to kindle cultural sensitivity. We let them know that they cannot assume things on the basis of their own upbringing. They need to be aware of that as they go into different cultures to practice and teach.”
Hahn plays an important role in recruiting and working with foreign students, as well as U.S. residents who plan to work abroad, Wells says. “If a person graduates from our program and wants to work in a developing nation, they will have some insights into the adjustments they will have to make,” she says.
Hahn’s other duties include providing support to the Department of Dental Public Health Sciences. He also works for the Biometry Core, which provides biostatistics support to dental researchers in a number of departments.
Here too, a little language skill comes in handy. For example, the department’s Dental Fears Clinic needed to produce some dental health materials in Spanish and Russian, for an Eastern Washington audience. Guess who got involved?
Hahn has been writing poetry for three or four years. “To me, this is an antidote to being very level-headed and system-oriented,” he says.
