Update

Sunday 12 March 2017

I have not written a post for this blog in a very long time, so here is an update from me:  I guess I will start with what I have been doing lately.  Over the past year or so, I have been studying Arabic again. I am so happy to be back into it. Before picking it up again last year, I had not opened an Arabic book since I graduated in 2003. I started conversation sessions in January 2016 and am still doing them. I initially started with an organization called NaTakallum which employs Syrian refugees to teach Arabic. My tutor is from Aleppo, Syria and is a refugee in Armenia. Her name is Varty.  I worked with only her all last year for one hour a week.

However, when I started again this year, I decided that I wanted more than just an hour a week with Varty, so I found another conversation partner through my friend Areen in Damascus. Her sister, Abeer lives in Dubai and is an Arabic tutor, so now I Skype with her once a week as well. I love talking to Abeer each week. She and I became friends instantly. We laugh through a good portion of the sessions. She loves the crazy stories I tell her in Arabic. Areen and Abeer call me their fourth sister. I love it. They are my sisters. (They have a little sister who just immigrated this year to Austria with her husband and two small children.)  

I also recently found through a Facebook refugee aid organizations, another Syrian woman from Damascus named Ola. Ola has only been here in the U.K. for a year and has recently had a new baby. He is three months old. I have desperately been searching for an Arabic conversation companion in the U.K. for a month or two. I made little posters and put my name on a bunch of the mosques notice boards all over North London and Luton. I really wanted to find a refugee woman in the U.K. who I could speak with in my same time zone.  I was hoping that I would be able to help her with English as she helps me with Arabic. Ola and I had our first session this week. She is lovely but struggling a lot with her new baby and not having any family around to help. Syrians always live near all their family traditionally, most of the time all in the same building. She seems a bit down and depressed being here so far from family. Her husband works long hours and she is too tired to go out to baby groups to meet people. So now I Skype with her once a week. I hope to be able to become better aquainted and be her friend most of all. I will help her with English and she will help me with Arabic. I am very excited about it. I can also help her with advice with her first baby. She is from Damascus and so we have some in common because of that as well.

UPDATE: Ola and I had our second Arabic conversation session today. I feel like I made a break through with her. I asked her to help me understand a song. She helped me work through all of the words. Then she listened to some articles I wrote in Arabic and I got her laughing. That was the best part. We definitely bonded today. She shared with me some other songs she loves in Arabic. It took her some time to understand my Arabic. Arabs aren't used to hearing people speak their language so they have a difficult time at first with the different accent and of course my pronunciation isn't always the best which can lead to some funny moments.

I am also hoping to start Quranic Arabic soon with a tutor from Pakistan. We will be reading through the Quran and working on my pronunciation. I am very excited to start these sessions. I would love to learn more than the first verse of the Quran which I memorized years ago.

Lastly, I still go to the refugee camps in France. However, the biggest camp there, the Jungle, has now closed but a smaller one of about 2000 refugees is in Dunkirk and I am going there on the 25 March to volunteer. They have asked us to do some pampering for the women there. I just bought henna pens and will bring my henna kit. I am sure I will be tutored in the art of henna more than I will be doing henna but I welcome it. I am also hoping to bring some Arabic music to listen to and a few tubs of chocolate. Hopefully it will be a nice day.

The past year as I have studied Arabic, many people have asked me why I study it and what I want to do with it. I had to really think about this for a while. I have finally decided that all I want to do with Arabic is to help people with it, whether that be just to speak to a refugee in her own language or help them acclimate themselves to their new surroundings or simply just have a friend in a new foreign place who speaks their language. I don’t care to make money with my skills just to help others. I may even try to volunteer with British Red Cross Refugee Support office which is near our house in the future. I feel like I have been given a great gift in the fact that I have a husband who has a job that provides really well for our family and that I do not necessarily need to work. Therefore, it allows me the opportunity to fulfil this dream without worry as to how much income it will bring, I can simply have the goal of helping someone else. Studying Arabic makes me so incredibly happy. I love speaking the language and writing it and even reading it. I am not incredibly amazing at it yet but little by little I am noticing progress and get very excited when I get a paper back from my tutor that is not as marked up as I thought it might be. I am also feeling more and more confident in my speaking abilities which I find very exciting.

I have also been helping my friend Areen who still currently lives in Damascus with her two sons and mother. I help Areen translate documents for her work. She works in micro-finance. Since I have racked my brains and cannot seem to find any other way to help her, I am so happy I can help with translation of these documents. I have learned a lot about the banks in Syria and emergency plans for employees and loans etc. Its not bad and Areen is so grateful for my help, so that makes me very happy. I Skyped with Areen and her family about a week ago. It was so fun to see her and we had a very animated conversation mostly with them all laughing at my Arabic. (I don't mind.) Afterward, I got thinking about it and noticed how tired Areen and her mother look. I asked Areen's sister about it and she said the stress of the last 6 years of war are really taking a toll on them both. Areen was recently in hospital for hypo-tension which is a result of a lot of stress. Her poor sons have known war for so long now, they don't seem to remember life without it. They feel it is normal. Areen is still very fearful of the real threat of them being kidnapped and thrown into the fighting. They are now 14 and 12 years old, I think.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to be involved in a huge clothing sort out through an aid organization called Herts for Refugees and with my church. I ended up coordinating some of it and doing most of the set up for the big day. I am still the stake refugee coordinator.  We had a couple of van loads of clothes donated from the movie Paddington II (most of the clothes were brand new). We ended up with mountains and mountains of clothes. People just kept driving up on the day and dropping off car loads of clothes. There were so many clothes that I started to worry that there was no possible way we would get it all sorted and boxed and transported. I thought we would have to cancel church the following day. However, we did get it all done which was absolutely amazing. The clothes have already gone to male refugees in France as well as clothes for women and children and babies to Syria and Iraq (which are being delivered this week!). So lost of exciting stuff and I am so glad to be a part of it all.   Here is a link to a song that almost makes me cry every time I listen to it. I know it is in Arabic but it is called "My home" or "My Country." It talks about the beauty and majesty of a person's homeland (originally written by a Palestinian but has lately been adopted by all people or refugees who have lost their homeland in the middle east).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbl3EChIhZ8