Quick Update

Yes, despite my previous apology about writing so little and my promise to be more diligent, I let things slip again.

But thanks to a Skype call from my parents urging me to update people and a subsequent email from a beloved relative doing the same… I’m sucking it up and at least providing an update!

As you may have figured out by now, I was having such an incredible time here that I extended my stay until the end of July.  I’ll officially be back in the States on July 30, which means I now have only 2.5 weeks left here—crazy, and too little time.

Part of the reason for my absence (and trip extension) is that I’ve signed up for two Arabic classes here.  My interactions with people I met in my daily life showed me how much I needed to improve my local dialect; really, it’s pathetic that I can read an Arabic newspaper but couldn’t understand what someone meant when they asked me the local equivalent of “What’s happening?”

The classes are specific for the Lebanese (cumSyriancumJordaniancumPalestinian) dialect, and they’ve been excellent so far.  I’m in class five days a week, Monday through Friday, for six hours a day 3x a week and three hours a day the other two.  In between that, I haven’t been doing much other than studying and SLEEPING; I had completely forgotten how utterly exhausting it is to study a language full-time.  Your brain shuts down early in the night, and even when you get nine hours of solid rest you still wake up exhausted.  It’s paying off for me, however; the other night I dreamt in Arabic (which I haven’t done since I was in Syria), and I can already tell that my daily interactions with people are improving.

I’ve also been doing little things here and there.  They haven’t seemed like things worthy of writing about, but they are part of my experience as a whole and thus deserve mention. 

The most significant of these little experiences is that I started spending a lot of time hanging out at a local food stand near my hotel, and I’ve gotten to know the people there quite well.  They’re all Syrian, and each has related to me his individual story; these have been just some of many similar stories that I’ve heard from others like them, and they are all heartbreaking.

Three of the guys who work there are brothers of varying ages.  The youngest is my age.  After attending a political protest in Damascus in 2011, he was arrested and detained for three months.  He was held in a small cell (he described it as about 6x6ft) with twelve other guys.  It was so crowded they couldn’t sit or lay down, and they had to take turns leaning on each other to sleep.  He was beaten, tortured—and the whole time his family had no idea where he was located or if he was even alive.  He recently had to have eye surgery to fix damage caused by the beating. 

And that’s not even the worst.  One of his other brothers here was in prison (also unknown to his family where) for seven months.  They have another brother still in Syria in prison.

So I’ve been hanging out at this shop, mostly just sitting outside with the regular patrons and workers, people-watching and using my growing dialect skills to understand their conversations.  I’ve hung out a few times with some of the nicer ones, which has resulted in me driving here—on separate occasions—a car as well as a moped.  Apparently, my driver’s license works here too—that is, if I were to be pulled over, which happens almost never as there are no real “rules of road.”  That later fact is terrifying and difficult to accept, and it led to my pulling over to the right side of the road and then slowing down to a stop when the car behind me on the highway turned on flashing red and blue lights.  The owner of the car—who has no conception of American state police and driving laws—had no idea why I was reacting they way I was, and found it all hilarious when I explained it to him.  The car merely had obnoxious lights and wanted to pass me; furthermore, I was more likely to run into a militia than the police in the neighborhood I was driving through.

That’s all for now… I will try (once more) to keep you all updated.  My time here is quickly dwindling!