Culture Shock...for Arabs

The other day some of the children in my host family came with me to my place of volunteering in Sweileh to help me and learn some new songs. This was exciting and fun for me, but quite an experience for these poor children.

Let me explain.

I live with an older couple, whose youngest daughter is 30. She still lives at home, but the rest are married and live all over the world. Two of the daughters, one who lives in Texas with her husband and three children and one who lives in a British compound in Saudi Arabia with her husband and three kids, are here with their families to visit for the summer. (Remember, I live in a large house, with a place for all of these people to stay for an extended period of time.)

I really admire the parents of these families, and especially the mothers (since the two fathers are in their respective countries working throughout the summer) who have raised their children bilingually.

But for both families, the primary and first language is English. My favorite is the children from Saudi Arabia, who have red hair and blue eyes (remember Zaina?) and who speak English (and Arabic) with a British accent.

Arabic, then, is a struggle for them, especially for the 7 year old (Hashem) from Saudi Arabia (Zaina, his sister, doesn’t speak Arabic at all). And although these kids are Arab through their bloodline, they are really American.

Imagine their shock and horror, then, to visit the community center at which I volunteer in one of the poorest areas of Amman. I don’t really think they had been exposed to this sort of trash-on-the-street, everyone staring at them and the women squeezing their cheeks, disorganized Arab society, and it was more than humorous to watch them.

First off, when we got to the community center, there seemed to be something large and important going on, because the room in which I usually teach was occupied.

With an overly large stack of clothing, spread all over the table.

Waiting for the room to be cleared out (this has never happened before or since, by the way), we sat in the front entrance. The community center is (I think) a converted house, so it is set up like a house and is in the middle of a tightly packed neighborhood, with people wandering in and out often. Like I said, something unusual was going on today, and there was a large amount of people in the front waiting room, including me and four children (along with men bringing in large crates of fruits and vegetables and setting them in the hall).

The women at the center naturally thought Raseel (9) and Jude (11) were adorable and kept squeezing their cheeks and asking if they were twins.

Raseel’s answer? “No, we’re not sisters…we’re cousins” (with all of it in Arabic except the word “cousins”).

And of course they were totally weirded out by the whole experience and kept complaining things to me, like “The room stinks!” and looking uncomfortable that everyone was touching their faces. And when I explained that we were in a poor area and most of these people were really poor, the 9 year old from Texas said to me, “Yeah, but at least in America poor people don’t sell you things at stoplights!” (which they do here—mostly “Fine,” or Kleenexes, but sometimes hats and little sweets and things like that through the window of your car).

I really would have expected the same thing if I had taken my little brother Bronson and my little sister Avalon to the community center—awkward smiles, a lot of complaining, and wanting to go home.

It was all I could do to keep from falling on the floor laughing—after all, these are Arabs!

And then, once class started, they kept speaking in English, and I had to translate for the rest of the class!

I guess all of us feel culture shock at one time or another in our lives!