Cultural Conversations

These last couple of weeks have been interesting...especially the part about being a teacher. It's given me a whole new (and probably better) perspective on and inspiration for learning Arabic than I may have had over these last couple of months. Don't get me wrong, I know that not learning while we're here would be the most horrible waste of opportunity. I understand that not taking advantage of the immersion would be foolish, but it has been a hard topic on which to inspire myself at times.

I'm one of those people who cracks up at the unfortunate translations on signs that end up proclaiming the sale of a ridiculously inappropriate item. I'm glad that kind of thing amuses me since now those things happen to me on a daily basis. Well, at least it's an inspiration to learn.

For example, the first time this really struck me was when Leigh (a fellow traveler here from Jacob's program at South Carolina) and I had been invited over to visit with the adolescent cousins of one of the GAP school teachers. We spent our afternoon with the girls being the best Omani hostesses they could be (here, that generally means plying all visitors with copious amounts of food). They brought in trays of juice, Mars bars, rapidly disintegrating popsicles, nuts, sodas, Arabic coffee and other treats as they entertained us by playing a pirated DVD of High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Leigh and I watched them, they watched us, we all watched the movie. Then, just after their grand coup--the delivery of chicken hut (which, they informed us was precious contraband since Sara's mother had forbidden her to eat it any longer since she was getting to "be like a cow"), they decided they should get our input on a story they'd written in their burgeoning English. It was a story about their typical day at school.

Now, let me interject here. It's an interesting place in which we find ourselves, censorship-wise. On one hand, TV and movies here are great. There has never been a case in which I have seen a scene get out of hand in a movie; they will go to great lengths and often massacre storylines to avoid an on-screen smooch. On the other hand, it's like they don't know what a curse word is! Every now and then they'll take out one random word (usually $hit, which is a mortally insulting concept to them) to the complete ignorance of EVERY OTHER WORD IN THE BOOK! We find ourselves frequently shocked to silence when our laughter about a botched kiss-edit is broken by a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush.

That said, maybe I shouldn't have been astounded when sweet, 13-year-old Sara proclaimed during her story that her P.E. teacher had put "cake in her a$$." I was dumb and desperately trying to piece together how she'd come up with such a ridulous and perverse treatment. As Leigh collapsed into fits of encouraging laughter, I searched my mind for the solution. I later learned, as she continued the story, that she meant KICK in her a$$, but the damage was done. I scolded leigh for egging on the profanity and instructed her on the proper spelling of kick versus cake, though I think she liked her first statement better than the correct one.

That little anecdote has been even more at the front of my mind since during one day last week I told the cab driver, in Arabic, to please take me to "cheeks" instead of "border" (he looked at me first as if I was a madwoman and then, upon my heated insistence, somewhat amusedly) and then my students that I'd been studying "aerobics" instead of "arabic" and was finding it very challenging. There are a lot of different sounds you have to make while you're learning, you know.

I just have to wonder, what else have I been saying?