#Fastforward

Fast forward, now I have internet on laptop momentarily ...

As you know, the other day I felt miserable. 11° Celcius in the day. Windy. No hot water at home and I was on day 3 of learning to speak Arabic which can take two years - for fast learners and I was hangry! I grumped my way to the restaurant where my badass friend works to have a coffee. There was a 8ish-year-old boy there speaking Arabic who attached himself to me, telling me long stories in Arabic, as kids do, and asking me questions and wanting answers. I was so frustrated by my inability to communicate verbally that my eyes welled up and a tear fell out. My Badass friend, incredulous, was like, “You’re crying.” Smile-crying, I snapped, “Even the 8-year-old speaks better Arabic than I!” followed by banging my head on the table in the style of Animal from the Muppets. I wanted to get on a plane and go to … but there isn’t anywhere to go. I’m not going to Trinidad when I’m trying to go East and I’m not going to the expensive, cold, dark and covid-ridden UK so yeah this was it. I just had to sit it out.

In my first weeks here, months even, learning Arabic was definitely not an option. It was way too big a task to simply start learning and I didn’t need it. Desperate Times Call for Desperate measures. Yes, I was getting by without it. Living in the hotel with the production crew there were enough English speakers to, I suppose satiate that part of me. Now, living alone in the town. I rarely come across English speakers and communication is difficult. Take for example buying firewood. In the end I had to walk to the firewood shop, take a photo of the telephone number, walk back to Sarah who called the number, say I was coming for 2 bags of wood and to deliver me home in a tuktuk. I go back to the shop I see a man, mime are you the guy Sarah talked to on the phone? I buy 2 bags and have a dance pointing to a tuktuk when a second man turns up and then I’m like, “Oh you’re the dude Sarah spoke to. I’ve already paid him (first dude).” So dude 2 knows a tuktuk is needed and somehow (I have NO idea how, especially as he refused to mime) he explains that I have to wait for Youseff who will take me home. In the meantime, I have to ask him whether if I take from the piles of date fronds (tinder- not the dating app) around the place would that be considered theft or are they just collected and everyone uses them… not such a stupid question as some piles seem private and others more… like someone just cleaned up the street. In the end, I walk down the street to some fronds and mime, “Can I take them home?” He comes over and helps me pull some out. Somehow, I understand dude one who says, “You need to learn to speak Arabic”. “Aywa, aywa”. I say. Aywa means yes.

Learning Arabic is nothing like learning Spanish! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! In my travels I’ve met people who learned a language hanging out on street corners chatting. I am not one of those people! I have to see the sentence structure in my head and to do that I have to read it or write it down, whatever it takes for me to ‘see’ it. At one point learning Spanish, I tried the technique of language-learning seen in the film, The Colour Purple… There were post its with words stuck all over the house - bookshelves, walls, the fridge, everywhere and it worked! I get that written Arabic is a script, a lyrical visual art I really do. But, for me it is squiggles. Different from Burmese which is bubbles. This terminology is obviously a form of othering [Baaaaad!!! Wrong at every level.] but, my reality is that I am Western-educated and until I am able to look less superficially- I see squiggles. I am also lazy and simply want to be able to communicate with the people I meet. I have no urge to read or write Arabic, as useful a language as it is on the African Continent – starting with signposts. Squiggles on post its won’t help this impatient woman learn to speak this language – now.

What I’m struggling with is that to learn Arabic I have to use my ears not my eyes. Even when I can find Arabic words written in the Roman Alphabet they don’t communicate the true sound of the letters and words. I literally have to play and replay youtube listening to conversational phrases, top 20 verbs, words you need to know, etc. Over and over. Adinfinitum. Every morning and every evening, at the very least. It doesn’t help them come out of my mouth but it helps me recognize them in conversations and slowly… revisiting each day a familiarity of sorts builds. There are some new letters like ‘eine’ (probably spelt in a variety of ways…) which is a sort of guttural sound like yuh gargling. Pronounciation of a word of course changes with accent but fuh now I just need to articulate the word well enough for it to be understood. Right now that’s not working so well. After proudly saying a word to someone who doesn’t speak English, disappointedly I have to repeat it several times, saying it differently each time usually not being understood.

After 6 weeks or so being here I realised there were some frequently used words I recognized in conversations. I asked what they meant. Aywa, yes; Laa, no; alhamduleh – thank God. Later came others, ayiza, want; hamzine, fifty (the nifty fifty camera lens). I tried Duolingo one of my go tos but it insisted I learn the squiggle alphabet and I couldn’t skip levels to avoid it. Then I remembered, there is this really great teacher online who was useful for learning Kiswahili (no one can replace Betty Kimani though!!) who teaches by building sentences. He (Languagetransfer.org) starts with simple sentences and adds more and more words and it’s all done by listening to him teaching a student and quickly you find yourself speaking… well, at least in my head, it takes longer to reach my tongue. So I went back to him and yes, he teaches Arabic and it’s Egyptian Arabic. Yayyy! Lesson 1!