Surrogate Brothers

The night before last I received a phone call from an unknown number at 12:30 AM. I was up, and this is a late-night culture, so I answered it. My friends have the strangest habit of calling me from their own phone or any friend or family member's phone, so it could easily be a friend calling from a different phone.

It wasn't. "Hello," the male voice said, in good English. Then it muttered something.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I want to speak with Awi," he replied.

"I'm sorry, you have a wrong number."

"Is this [and here he repeated my number]."

"Yes, but you must have an old number, because I've had this phone for seven months."

"Oh, I'm sorry," and then he hung up.

Twenty minutes later, I received this text (spelling and grammar retained):

"I'm sorry for the A:M wrong call but you sound american and I like the way you tailk.i was thinking that i was in Newyork for a second. anyway if you didn't like my text mes. i'm sorry but it really was a good wrong a:m call. nigth nigth"

Great. I ignored the text and went to bed.

At 3:19:03 am, he texted again: "r u sleeping"

Well, buddy, I was, but not now. Again, I ignored the text.

Apparently being ignored isn't a language he speaks, because he called me yesterday. I hadn't saved his number in my phone, so I answered the call. Fortunately, I was visiting in the home of some local friends, and a father and his two teenaged sons were in the room. "Who is this?" I asked the caller.

"The guy from last night," he replied.

I put my hand over the receiver and handed the phone to the older brother: "Would you please tell this guy to never, ever call me again?"

My friend let out a stream of Arabic to the shocked caller. When the dad, who doesn't speak English to understand my request to his son, discerned what was happening, he demanded the phone. By the time his son tossed it to him, I think my surprised stocker had hung up. Lucky for him, because he would have gotten an earful from that dad.

This had actually happened a couple of weeks earlier with a different person who didn't speak much English. He called me repeatedly, and one of the last times he called was while I was watching a movie with some western friends. I handed the phone to one of the guys, and he told him not to call his sister again. The only catch was that my friend doesn't speak much Arabic, so he probably didn't get his point across as well as my friend did yesterday.

So nice to have brothers to fill in for my blood brothers back at home.