Culture Exposed

This evening I quite a challenging conversation with a young woman who was born and raised in Egypt but is half Lebanese. Our discussion was challenging in that it made me question why I care about the Arab culture, what I find attractive in it, and how (in a slightly accusative sense) can I pledge my support for it. She began by asking me why I wanted to study Arabic. I replied, "Because I love the culture." Then she asked me why I loved it, and, with as honest a voice as they come, she began to criticize her own culture as being aggressive, manipulative, naive, ignorant, and unreasonable. As I listened to her testimony, I could concur with her observations and assumptions, but I also looked past them.


I looked past the harsh nature of the culture bred from a history of waring and an unrelenting environment. I looked past the stigmatizing communal ideas of "each man for himself" and "blood is thicker than water" acting concurrently. I looked past the seemingly squelching social standards which can produce a virulent, nescient adherence to command. I saw the individuals: the woman behind the veil who watched her baby take his first steps today, than man in the galabaya who rushed home with excitement after an enlightening sermon at the mosque on Friday. Every people group has its flaws, as does every individual person, but every individual has his/her own story as well. Each one of them is worth the attention of God. Are they not also worth my attention and your attention?


I told her that I loved the Arab culture, especially the parts that make me laugh (which are many). I love how very different it is from what I've ever known. I love the history which is ever present in it. I love the intensity of its emotions and interactions. I simply love the people, and I can't always explain why.


Upon her mention of the negative aspects of her culture, I mentioned some of the positive aspects; the freedom women have in comparison to the assumed lack there of; the beauty and wealth in riches, goods, art, language, food, and music which the culture has produced; the spectacular infrastructures which, though not as congealed as the West in many areas, are quite advanced. She told me that I need to see the "real" Egypt. I need to go south to some of the cities which have not been touched by the West. There I can find the real Arab culture, and then I can know what it is really like. "Though," she said, "more than 70% of the people there are illiterate." "Than I need to know the language," was my reply.


Already I admire the culture that I see, because I see the people through the eyes of compassion and understanding. I am certain that in the future I will grow in admiration toward the culture that I cannot yet see. This is not because I have taken it upon myself to expose and analyze the flaws, but it is because I simply love the people. They are beautiful, and I want to know them through their own words.

Language Acquisition: Some Days I Feel Like a Nut, Some Days I Don’t

Several years ago, I participated in a trip with my church to Madrid, Spain. The brief immersion into the Spanish language was one of the first stimulants of my desire to know a foreign language. There was young man in his twenties from California who assisted our group throughout or stay. His command of the Spanish language was outstanding! Native speakers commented on his perfect accent and the flawless fluency with which he spoke. True he had studied Spanish in grade school and had been living and working in Spain for five years, but I regarded this as a moot consideration. At the time, I felt indubitably clever for being able to bargain with the gypsies and find the location of bathrooms quicker than my co-travelers. Little did I know how truly difficult it is to fully acquire a second language.

Arabic…How enrapturing it would be if I could wake up one morning and, as Nike so simply promulgates, just speak it. To hold this lofty expectation is not only an unreasonably fanciful dream, similar to my dream of looking like Keira Knightly when I wake up in the morning, but it is also simply impossible. This language is a complex system of words and phrases combined in such a way as to emphasize certain ideas and words and convey specific emotions and requests. For example, a method of adding prefixes and suffixes is employed rather than attaching pronouns and direct pronouns to a verb, thus lengthening the verb and causing that one word to encompass the subject and the direct object. Try speaking that in a split second. Even harder, try listening to that in a split second.

I envy those who learned multiple languages as they were growing up. A child learns more in the first eight years of his life than he learns throughout his remaining years on the earth. As a teacher in Jerusalem, I had a student who knew four languages at the age of eight. Though he was still learning and didn’t use all four of them equally as much, it still amazed me how his mind could process all four languages: English, Arabic, Hebrew and Swedish. I do not recall learning English as being a tortuous experience, but as I sit back and think about it, how my mind commands the language at present without having to continually process it is a staggering feat. How did this happen? How did my mind acquire such a skill without me really knowing and recognizing it? The final end of language acquisition (which I do believe is a never ending process) is to actively produce the language without thought: without having to sit back and form the words and phrases. “Just do it,” I am told. “Teba3n (Of course) it will come if you just listen, repeat, and speak.”

As an adult, to try and learn another language, which is leagues different from your native tongue, is like having an eternal root canal. Because spoken Arabic is a bit different from the written language, it is like having a root canal on both sides of your mouth…without an anesthetic. Of course the degree of torture is relative to the degree to which one wants to learn. I want to learn it…very badly.

Every day I get out of my bed, I am humbled by how little I know and pressed even harder to study. Though I don’t remember being two years old, I feel like I am two years old again. I long to communicate, but I can’t. I have ideas I want to convey, but I just don’t know how. I stand and stare having little to no idea what the people around me are saying relying mostly on the looks in their faces, tones of their voices, and gestures of their hands. I stammer and embarrass myself on a daily basis as I test the patience of my friends and teachers while trying to speak in Arabic. As I look back at all of the unbelievably embarrassing moments I’ve had through my life, I realize how truly great it is that I am able to make an absolute fool of myself with little to no care. Daily I make a fool of myself. Daily. Anxiously I look for new words, and with a child-like excitement, I conjugate them and attempt putting them to use. If I don’t use them repeatedly, I entirely forget them. With exuberance I rejoice when I understand what a person is saying, even though I only understand maybe 10% of what was said and usually that 10% can be translated “yes,” “no,” “left,” “right,” “Praise God.”

*I must take a step back and convey to you some of the initial frustrations and hilarities in learning Arabic. Have you seen the movie The God’s Must be Crazy? I won’t take the time to discuss the plot, which is relatively doltish but amusing at three o’clock in the morning, but I want to address their language. The characters use not only English but also Afrikaans and Ungwatsi. While watching the movie, all one really hears are the cool clicks and unfamiliar inflections in the sounds of their voices. These clicks and inflections are actually words. Can you hear it? Probably not. Now back to the Arabic…When, as a person who doesn’t speak Arabic, you listen to the language, you can’t automatically distinguish the sounds nor hear when one word ends and another begins. The initial phase of acquiring a language is adjusting your ear to that language. Unfortunately, I have a self-imposed aversion to watching television (which supposedly is a wonderful way to learn a language), so I practice listening by hovering around Arabic speakers with my eyes wide open, yet focusing on nothing, and a more attentive ear than that of a professional eavesdropper. It works well. Don’t try it unless you have developed an instinctive technique of acting as though you were not paying attention when the people turn around and stare at you with accusative look.

Despite the frustrations, I can already see a change, and it is the little satisfactions that provide the incentive to continue on. I don’t think I’d put my transformation on the same level as baptism or genuine repentance, but shwya, shwya (little by little). I hear from the taxi drivers, “Bitikelm 3raby kuwyis.” (“You speak Arabic well.”) I find myself speaking mixed Arabic and English, even though it may simply be a word here and there (this my father in the states finds entirely annoying). Additionally, I find myself forgetting to use capital letters in English and having to spend a significant amount of time producing some English words, even basic ones. I repeat verb conjugations and phrases while I’m walking the streets and riding the metro. I can only image how this sounds to the people riding next to me. I wouldn’t blame them for assuming I had aphasia or dementia, but I definitely find the sounds and words coming a bit easier. “Just do it,” I am told. “Teba3n (Of course) it will come if you just listen, repeat, and speak.”

I have been considering going all the way and learning the language to the point where I can teach it. After speaking to several linguists and professors of the language, the only thing I could see were the dollar signs flying by my head in light of the amount of schooling it would require, but Insha’Allah (God willing) we will see. In my language heaven, I dream of learning everything I can about Arabic, including the vocabulary, and then just waking up one day speaking, reading, writing, and using it fluently. This is language heaven: a surreal, euphoric existence which cannot be attained, even after the confession of linguistic sin and the acceptance of proper conjugation and morphology. I can visual my goal, but only time, practice, and usage will get me there. I do believe that I can learn this language, and I want to…very passionately. If only to communicate with the young boys I see sleeping on the metro, I want to learn this language. Some days I get it; some days I don't, but it will come if I just do it.

In the Midst of the Mountains

This past weekend I took a trip to St. Catherine in the Sinai Desert with a couple friends. This was a long awaited trip as my climbing friend Nick and I have been trying to get out there to for several weeks. I must admit that he has been trying more than I, primarily because he is more willing to sacrifice class time in case of the "random happenings" which can never be anticipated.


**One side note of interest is our preparation for travel. First off, it had included the attempt at getting a bus schedule. Our investigation usually ended with the casual mention that a bus might leave from a certain station at such and such a time, but who really knows. Furthermore, you can never be too sure whether this information is completely accurate, nor can you confidently be reassured that there will be a bus present to return you to your place of origin. Secondly, in our attempt to actually find climbing routes and places to sleep, apart from a couple decently reliable sources, we were usually told to “just wait until you get there” (a recurring theme in this country). Thirdly, a lot of trips and outings amongst locals and foreigners (specifically AUC students) are usually planned last minute without specific details, figures, directions, etc. These details usually remain obscure throughout the course of the trip. Talk about an adventure.


After a few God-ordained meetings and a couple “leaps of faith,” I was on my way to St. Catherine with my friend Omar, in his amazingly beautiful car with a private driver, to the desert to meet Nick who’d traveled via a hired mini-bus with four other students the night before. Once the city melted out of sight (which, like Las Vegas, happens quite quickly; once you’re out of it, you’re out of it), the Red Sea came and left, and the mountains started to rise like brown giants before my eyes, my heart leapt with anticipation! This anticipation drained significantly when, four hours into our drive, I realized that I had forgotten the second climbing rope. With only one rope only two people can climb. This doesn’t much help a climbing group of three. This heart wrenching cognizance prepared me even more for the “just wait until you get there” mindset. Sometimes one can only throw preparation to the wind and go with what he has. Learning to keep a solid, optimistic mindset in such circumstances is one of the intents of the desert.


St. Katherine is truly a place of wonders and relief. It is a small, quiet, quaint little town nestled amongst the brown giants that stretch across the peninsula welcoming visitors, tourists, those seeking rest and refuge, and pretty much any living thing (especially cats, which are quite prolific at the Holy Valley Hotel). This little town rests upon the theme, “Let’s just take what comes our way, and the rest we’ll leave behind.”


Whereas Nick was much too relaxed to remove his tent and it’s contents sprawled out on the ground from the Fox Camp (which is a lovely, cheap little camp where you can sleep on the ground, smoke shisha in a Bedouin tent, eat meals under a little grass hut, and wonder what all those green plants on the edge of the property are), Omar, the driver and I decided to stay at the Sheik Moussa Camp. Contrary to popular thought, Sheik Moussa is not presently owned by Sheik Moussa. It’s owned by a lovely British man named Mark who just recently bought it from the Sheik and renovated the kitchen (always a good decision). We slept in a room with four rug-clad mats on the ground, pillows that had covers which looked as though they had been there since the early 80’s (either that or the cats bit all the holes in them), an adorable white window with shutters which was definitely worth the picture, and a wide mirror on the opposing wall. A king could not have asked for a more lavish space.


In the nights, we ate homemade meals of curry chicken and rice with rum and Coke (I drank water), sat around the dinner table with talk of politics and stars, moved to the fire with it’s burning coal embedded in a round metal bowl, sat on mats on the ground underneath the Bedouin tents talking and singing and drinking and smoking until we each drifted to our personal mats to sleep with not a sound outside our windows.


Though I could go on and on about the wonderfulness of St. Catherine, I will sum up as many of the main points as I can. We climbed, and we climbed well. Omar, Nick and I had to be a little creative in delegating who was to climb what for how long, but it all just fell into place. “Just wait until you get there.” Omar didn’t quite make a record for climbing Mount Moussa (the possible location of Mt. Sinai and the manifestation to Moses) in approximately an hour, but I think I beat the record for hiking up the mount in a state of dehydration in less than one and a half hours. That was fun, in a half-sarcastic sort of way. I missed the sunset, but I enjoyed a lovely cup of tea with two Bedouins (one of them our guide) at one of the candy stands on the mountain.


The following day, as Omar and Nick attempted another climb in the mountains, I rested under the sun on a rock high above the dirt path where camels carried their masters and their master’s goods to who knows where. I heard a group of woman and children below, and decided to assess the scene. As I carried out my reconnaissance, I was invited to join the women who were sitting in the shade of a rock off the beaten path caring for children, chatting, cooking, sewing handicrafts and looking at the two M&M spectacles (Omar & Nick) dancing on the rock above them with disbelief and a mother’s “I can’t believe you are doing that!” attitude. I quite enjoyed partaking food with them and watching them interact in such a relaxed atmosphere as if there was nothing that mattered more than sitting under that rock with each other. They hold such a beautiful culture that knows how to cherish the rest, the silence, the simple, the fellowship. I recall one conversation with a Bedouin man who managed the camp where we stayed. I asked him if he’d ever been to the States. He said no, but he would someday. “I am a Bedouin. I can travel anywhere. Insha’Allah.”