A Nice Chat

I got an email about two weeks ago from the coordinator of the Bedouin student center on campus, asking if I’d be interested in meeting with one student a few times to chat a little bit and practice her English. I said of course, and we exchanged a few emails to coordinate a time to meet up. When we did meet, she really was no what I expected. She wore a head covering, though she was dressed in jeans and a jacket, which, according to my understanding, is pretty progressive, seeing as I don’t think many of the ankle length dress clad Muslim women walking around campus are trying to make a fashion statement. I guess I was expecting a quiet, reserved, introverted girl, hesitant to speak English, Hebrew or even Arabic with me, but the girl who met me at the door of the student center had a wide smile and greeted me enthusiastically in Hebrew as soon as she saw me.

Chanin studies medicine at Ben Gurion (similar to a pre-med program) but when I mentioned that I study computer science, she confessed that she’d love to study computers are well but her parents want her to become a doctor (again, unexpected from my end). She told me that she took a year off after high school during which she started small business where she bought computers wholesale in Tel Aviv then sold them locally for a profit. Talk about entrepreneurship! This girl really surprised me. We talked about our families (she’s the youngest of… a lot) and she said she’d be happy having anywhere between 3-10 kids. Yeah. Also, that a family like mine (4 girls) would never fly in the Arab world. We’d turn into the x Marcus girls and the x+1^th boy, I suppose, eventually.

After speaking for a while, she had to get going to class so we walked over to the medical studies building together and agreed to meet up again sometime soon. Haven’t seen her yet since, as the Pesach break and finals have made things a bit hectic around here. She really did a number on my stereotypes, which was really cool. By the end of the conversation we were both speaking mostly Hebrew. Maybe next time it’ll be mostly Arabic, in which case the only things we’ll have been capable of talking about will have been the weather, shopping in the Shuk, a future career in the UN, or Ramadan. Could talk about Ramadan forever, thanks to chapter 2 of my textbook. I can not wait until I start learning some, any, speakable dialect. Fittingly, if I will it, it is no dream.