Shwei

I'm to the point where I know JUST enough Arabic so sometimes taxi drivers, shopkeepers, or host relatives I meet ask me "btitki Arabi?" (You speak Arabic?). "Shwei" (A little) is my response. Usually after this they say literally anything longer than "Khaif halik?" (how are you?) or "Sabah alkhair" (good morning!), I'll not understand, and they get it: saying I know "a little" Arabic is pretty generous.

My very first week I witnessed a boy who grew up speaking Arabic take a German lesson taught in English. He is eleven. I struggle to pick up one new Arabic phrase a day, and that is with people speaking intermediate to fluent English surrounding me at nearly all times. Yet this boy is able to learn a third language using his second language, one in which he's still not even close to being fluent either. Speaking three languages in my home community is a rarity, something one could use as the subject for a college essay, even. At the Evangelical Lutheran School of Beit Sahour (ELS), students don't graduate high school unless they get pretty close.

As inferior as I constantly feel to my soon-to-be trilingual students, my native English tongue is treasured by students, teachers, and coworkers alike. One of the teachers I work with forbid me from speaking any Arabic (so...the ten phrases I know...) in his classroom so the students can hear as much as possible from a native speaker. Another teacher I work with thanked me profusely the two times I've spotted errors in the school's English textbook. I feel most helpful editing grants and papers both for the ELS and for my second placement at the Environmental Education Center. Both rely on grants from European countries to continue their important work.

It seems unfair to me that these people who can communicate beautifully in their native tongue must change their stories into a language which is foreign in this place. One instance from last week highlights this particularly well--when my supervisor at the EEC was describing for me a recent Student Leadership Training so I could write it up as part of a grant proposal to a church in Sweden. Our system became this; she'd look down at the notes she'd written (in Arabic) at the time of the training, summarize them out loud (still in Arabic) to gather what needed to be included, then translate it out loud to English so I'd understand. I typed this as notes, and later went back and edited so it read grammatically correct and with fluidity. It felt wrong that I, a person absent from the event itself and influent in the presiding language of the event, was the one who's writing described it to the (hopefully) generous Swedes.

My language grants me this volunteer work and a way to interact with the community here, and for this I am selfishly grateful. This doesn't negate my avid attention to Arabic phrases my host dad teaches me on the porch while we discuss politics, or words my host mother says to me and my German colleague in the car on the way to school in the morning or the gym after dinner. I treasure these for moments like last Wednesday, when I got into a cab with a driver who knew as much English as I know Arabic. We were able to share a laugh over a herd of sheep stopped us in the middle of the road for a minute or so. "Shwei shwei", I said, an Arabic phrase meaning "slowly slowly", similar to our "little by little". Laughter knows no language barrier.

This place, these people, this culture, were all created by and themselves created the Arabic language, not English. It's abundantly clear how much depth my experience here in all aspects will gain if I can devote some significant brain space to a language completely foreign to me. You know, what 100% of my students have been doing since they were four years old.

A little traffic jam en route to a school in Ramallah, where my coworker provided the school's Environmental Club with some resources and infrastructure.

Sunset from the parking lot of the Beit Sahour gym after a Tuesday night session with my host mom and German colleague.