Weekend Adventures

An old village

Looking down from the high mountain, which is close to 10,000 ft (though this is not from the top)

It's difficult to capture the majesty on camera

I thought I was going to have multiple chances to hang out with friends this weekend, but by Wednesday afternoon most of them seemed to be falling through. No follow up on the wedding invitation for Wednesday evening. My friend in the capital couldn’t do the road trip to visit a student’s family on Friday. Another student might call and invite me to lunch or dinner with his family, but who could say? So I stayed home and wondered what I would do all weekend. (Lesson plan? Yeah, maybe. But who wants to lesson plan if you can hang out with people?) I felt like the girl who sits home on a Friday night and waits for a prospective date to call, except different. Besides, it was a Wednesday night.

It was 7:30-ish when the call came. “Sorry, Teacher. We’ve been busy all day until now, so we couldn’t call sooner. Can you come now? Have you had dinner?” Now? Like, drop everything and come? Oh yeah, I’m not doing anything important.

So I went. I managed to decipher the Google map my student had sent enough to find the house eventually. I was nervous. I knew my student, of course, but not his wife and children. I liked them easily and met his older sister and her brother, also. His 42-year-old sister had never completed school (schools were probably a novelty in her day), marrying at 14. Now that her children are grown, she is back in school, and she had had a test that day.

I couldn’t tell if “Have you had dinner?” meant “You’re invited to dinner,” so I mentioned leaving shortly after the sister and brother-in-law left. But no. I was to have dinner with my student’s family. My student’s wife got up to set it out, and I joined her and her maid in the kitchen. They brought the plate back into the living room area and set it on the coffee table in front of the couch. “This is for you,” my student said. “We want you to be comfortable.” Another family had done this to me previously, so I realized that this was politeness. They’ll sit on the ground and eat off of one plate, and they realize that this is strange to westerners. So they’ll leave you alone to sit on the couch and eat with a spoon from your own plate. Booooring.

I hesitated and asked if this was what they preferred. No, it was for me. Because they sit on the ground, because they eat with their hands off one plate. I told them I was fine with that. As long as I wouldn’t disrupt their family time. As long as it was okay for me to sit and eat with my male student. (Men and women generally do things separately here.) They said it was fine. They still gave me my own plate, but we sat together on a mat on the porch, under the moon and a sprinkling of stars. Glorious. My student said the Bismillah, and we dug in. They were relaxed, speaking Arabic with occasional translation.

At the end of the meal we had tea and soda. Then we moved inside and had coffee and dates.

They had asked earlier if I would join them on a family outing the following day. It’s sometimes hard to tell what is politeness and what is not, but after some hesitation and questioning, I decided they really did want me. (The 9-year-old daughters had asked if I were going to spend the night and seemed disappointed when the answer was no, so that was one clue.) Besides, they were joining the sister and brother-in-law I had met, who had also invited me and seemed to like me, so it was probably okay. I said I would go. What time? Maybe 9:00, maybe 10:00, maybe 11:30. They weren’t sure, but they would let me know. (This lifestyle ain’t for neurotic planners!)

So I rearranged my morning schedule and played the waiting game again. At 10:30, a text: “Good morning. Are you ready?” I was, and they picked me up at 11:00. The rest of the day was seven hours of happiness. I didn’t talk a lot, but I was part of the family. They treated me graciously, but they didn’t fuss over me. They spoke Arabic without translation. They didn’t balk at me sitting on the ground and eating from the same plate. (They momentarily balked at me not having a spoon, but they gave me bread to help me out with the rice. I’m still working on my eating-rice-by-hand technique.) I watched the ladies cook the rice over an open wood fire the men prepared. We discussed the names for the spices. The men barbecued meat nearby. I played Uno with the children, then taught them Dutch Blitz. I loved hearing them call out the letters and numbers, with barely a word of English to spoil the effect. My student drove his sister (and her maid), wife, and me as close as we could get to the top of the highest mountain in the country. I talked about the US with his wife in the back seat as we rode. He’d like to study there someday, she told me. She wants to be somewhere cold (yes, really), in the country. “Maybe Boston,” she told me. (Except that Boston is hardly country, so maybe a bit further north, think I.) My student’s sister played me some of her religious music, which has a lovely sound.

After dinner and packing up and saying our goodbyes to the sister’s family, we headed back. I talked some in English with the family’s maid, who is from the Philippines and speaks more English than Arabic. I was happy when we stopped to go through a car wash, because I was sad for the day to end. “This has been my best day [here], I told my student and his wife. I’m so happy I could cry.” That English expression might have flown by them, but it was true. It was so nice to be included in family.

They dropped me off on the path to my apartment, and small hands waved me goodbye as I walked home.