Kathleen Lantto

ARAB 102
Sawsan Abbadi
3/23/2017
Tea and TV with a new friend

I waited on the couch with Ahmeds wife and daughter while he got

ready to leave. We were doing a transportation orientation today, a standard

activity at my resettlement office. In the job development department, we

take clients on a tour of the public transportation route they have to take to

work and back a few days before their first day of work. This often takes us

downtown to hotels, out to the OHare airport, or sometimes farther west of

the city. But today was the farthest one yet, to a company out in the suburb

of Des Plaines, IL that specializes in halal airline food production.

Ahmeds wife offers me a plate of maamuul, a sweet Arabic cookie. I

say shukran, and then look to the little girl and say tudriidiin? She looks

surprised at me, and then shyly looks to her mom to ask permission to take

a cookie. We talk as much as we could, which mostly consisted of me trying

to describe what kind of a student I am. anaa Taaliba fii al-jaamia fii

Chicago. adrus .. adrus al-anaas wa al-Hizb. I think that I must sound crazy,

that studying people and a political party makes me sound like someone who

people-watches at the mall and watches too much TV new and thinks theres

only one party.

Later in the day, Ahmed and I are on our way back home, an hour and

a half of buses and walking ahead of us. I am relieved that we had just gone

over family members in class because that gave us a good half of our
conversation. Ahmed comes from Jordan, his wife from Syria, and he has 3

sons and 1 daughter. His brother in law is resettled in Sau Paulo, Brazil, and

we actually Skyped with him for 20 minutes as we waited for our Pace bus to

pick us up on the way home. We mixed English, Arabic, Portuguese and my

little Italian and Spanish knowledge to communicate as best as we could, but

we mostly just exchanged compliments of person, of city and surroundings,

of language abilities.

I was tired from our 4 hours in the field, trekking to and from Ahmeds

new job, and mentally exhausted pulling all my Arabic knowledge to the

forefront of my brain. I know that resettlement is hard, that learning a

language from the beginning in an immersive setting is draining, and that

most of the jobs refugees can find in a city like Chicago are far from the

center, minimally stimulating and have long shifts. This is exhausting for

social workers like my coworkers and me, and more so for our clients.

Our bus was fast-approaching his stop and I was dreaming of a nap,

having dozed on the bust for the last few stops since our conversation had

again run dry due to the lack of material about which we could talk in our

disjointed English and Arabic. Ahmed turned to me and asked if I would like

to come to his home for tea, saying it out loud in Arabic, then saying

whichever words he knew in English, then pulling up his Google Translate app

with the Arabic pre-typed in and a version of the translation in English next

to it. He had prepared that statement, thinking through his word choice in
Arabic, exerting himself to pick out English vocab, and working to ensure my

comprehension.

The tea had just the right balance of cinnamon and sugar, and we got

to rest together on his couch, this time not striving for conversation but

exchanging thank-yous and shukrans, expressive of the gratitude we both

felt towards each other for taking the time to serve the other in our own

capacities.