Worlds Apart

Orientation is over, and I've had my first week of truly working at TYO. It was a crazy week that left me rather exhausted by the end, but it was generally a really positive kind of crazy. If you've been following TYO, you may see the intern blog posts on their site. Some of my experiences are already documented there (we are required to blog once a week so you can keep an eye out at http://www.tomorrowsyouth.org/blog/ for news of me).

The work week here begins on Sunday, which is mostly meetings but includes a professional competency course that we interns give at An-Najah University here in Nablus. Since I am working an unpaid internship rather than a job with an income, I'm not sure how qualified I am to talk about professional competency. And in fact, this class was my greatest challenge of the week. I had about 30 students registered on my list; nine people showed up (and 5 of those nine were not on my list). Of that group, one had good English and a couple more could mostly follow what I said, but the majority were totally lost. It's supposed to be only advanced English speakers since I have no Arabic to fall back on if someone gets confused. Hopefully today will be better.

My classes here at the center are a far more positive experience. We started off on Monday greeting the morning core program students (the core program is taught by Palestinians. In the morning they have 4-5 year olds and in the afternoon they have 6-8 year olds. The intern program is for older kids).

Two of the cuties that we got to briefly hang with.

This little girl grabbed my hand and didn't want to let go. I don't even know her name, but she still touched my heart.

Later that morning, I had my first beginner's English class for the Women's Group. The Women's Group is for moms in the community, especially the moms of the kids that come to TYO. I'm REALLY enjoying teaching basic English to these women. Since I know no Arabic, I have to get my English points across by using over-the-top gestures and expressions and generally acting like an idiot. It's a LOT of fun.

On the mornings I'm not teaching English, I'm co-teaching women's aerobics. This is another funny experience. Lila, the intern teaching with me, and I have a translator for this one so we can coherently tell women to not stick their butts in the air when they do push-ups, but I still get to act a bit silly and dance around to Enrique Iglesias. I get a work out too so along with my healthy eating habits here, I'm probably going to come home in much better shape than when I left. One of the most interesting parts of aerobics is that we close the curtains and doors so that eh women can take of their outer layers and wear work out gear. They all come in with their heads, arms, and legs covered but shed all that so they're in tanks and leggings to work out. I especially find the women who have their hair styled interesting since no one sees that.

The afternoon is for my kids' classes. They are a lot of fun though exhausting, but then that's the case of kids the world over. I work with a fantastic translator named Ruba (she's so awesome, I can't even explain. I hope that she makes it to the States someday; she's actually hoping to get a Fulbright to get her Masters in the US).

This is one of my girls. Her name is Nahida. I had them draw a school bus (back-to-school theme, plus we read a Magic School Bus book) and put their names on it to decorate the classroom.

For the second class, we made our own puzzles. These boys are drawing the picture that they will turn into puzzle pieces.

A piece of the puzzle.

And now they're working to put their picture back together.

Once the week was over, Megan, Tommy, and I went off to Tel Aviv for Friday and Saturday. Lila had to stay behind because someone needed to be here to let in the BBC (I'll talk about that some other time as it isn't over yet) and Humaira, Tala, and Samin were also out of town for the weekend.

Tel Aviv is a little over an hour away from Nablus, but it is completely different. Nablus is a conservative city, even for Palestine: Tel Aviv is where Israel goes to party. When we arrived on Friday, we spent day wandering around the Carmel market before taking a brief beach break on our way to Jaffa, the old city next to Tel Aviv (Jaffa is mentioned more than once in the Bible. It's where Tabitha was raised from the dead and St. Peter dreamed of being allowed to eat pork--I'm paraphrasing).

Here we are in Jaffa with Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean in the background.

That evening we hung out at our hostel and met a lot of cool people. We were staying in a four bed room, and our room mate was from France (making me realize how incredibly terrible my French has become. It was awful, but I tried). We also met a British couple and several Israelis from Nazareth (though they were originally from Russia, I guess).

Saturday we slept in and then spent the whole day on the beach. Tommy and Megan impressed the chair and umbrella rental guy by speaking Arabic (he was from Sudan). Two of the food/drink servers on the beach we were at also came and hung out with us whenever they had a moment. They were also Russians that came to Israel. They seemed impressed by our work with the Palestinians. Also, Tommy took a picture with a Bavarian.

Tommy with the Bavarian lady. He's pretending to be holding a beer.

All in all, it was a good weekend getaway. Now I'm back in Nablus, and the difference between the two places could not be starker. I'm pretty happy to be home though even if the BBC has taken over temporarily.

Updates and Reflections

So where was I last time I blogged? I talked about Ueno, yes? Well, I hate to ruin everyone's image of my glamorous and busy life here, but really there are times where I just do normal stuff. However, there have been a couple of interesting happenings.

Sunday was a busy day with the Inagaki family (my host family). Mami, Su-chan, and I made pumpkin pie (thanks Dad!) finally. We had some trouble locating pie crust and neither Mami nor I wanted to go through the trouble of trying to make it ourselves in the cramped little kitchen. It was my host family's first experience with pumpkin pie and it wasn't a bad one though not nearly as good as grandmom's of course.

After pie, Mami, Su-chan, and I went over to Sam-chan's house (Sam being a half-Japanese boy that goes to the same daycare as Su-chan). Why did we go? Because Sam's mother wanted to offer me a job as a babysitter for her two children Sam (2) and Elena (4). I agreed since a. I need money and b. I like kids. Plus, it's just three times per week for just an hour or two each time. Not that bad really. I had my first day on Monday (which actually included Su-chan) and had a lot of fun though it was quite exhausting keeping all three of them entertained.

But back to Sunday! An amusing thing happened around 10:30 when I was about to head to bed (I know, kind of early, but I had Japanese the next morning!) My host dad suddenly wished Mami a happy birthday! I turned to her and said, "Eh?". And she told me she had forgotten it was her birthday! How could she? Her younger sister Tomo was even over that day (to partake of pumpkin pie) and didn't say anything! So anyway, Mami is now 31 years old. And now I know the birthdays of everyone in my host family ^_^

In things to look forward to: As soon as my media studies class is over tomorrow, I am done with class until after Golden Week (Japanese holiday period). Tomorrow night, I am spending the night doing karaoke (and I mean spending the night--fun starts at 11pm and ends when the trains start running again at 5am). Then, this weekend, I'm going on a trip with my host family. We're visiting Mami's older sister again. This time, there's a big group of us going including Jeremy (Mami's parents' host student). This time I promise to remember my camera so I can get pictures.

---

Now for some thoughts on culture inspired by the torturous three hour lesson on keigo we had in Japanese class yesterday (Monday).

Those of you who have studied some Japanese probably recognize the term keigo even if you can neither use nor understand it. Keigo is Japanese honorary/humble speech. Unlike English, they have almost an entirely different vocabulary for use in situations where extra politeness is needed. Mostly keigo changes up the verbs you use in a sentence. For example, if you want to say "My teacher went to the airport." you would need to use the keigo verb for "went" which is "irashaimashita" instead of the normal form "ikimashita". Annoying yes? But wait! There's more! The above example relates only to talking about superiors like a teacher or boss. But what do you use when you talk about yourself to a superior? Why, different verbs once again! Not only that, but when you want to be polite there are often nouns and other parts of speech you change as well. The word "ie" which means house becomes "otaku", the word "doko" which means where becomes "dochira" (which also means "which" ugh).

As of now, I have had several lessons try to drill keigo into my brain very unsuccessfully. Partially this is because I never use it. I don't have a formal job where I need to speak to a boss, my Japanese professors require nothing more polite from us than "masu/desu" for except those times when we actually study keigo, and I talk to my other professors in English. However, I have come to believe this is not the only reason I find keigo difficult. I think there is a deeper social wall that makes it hard for me to actually see the merit of such a linguistic structure.

The idea behind keigo is that you are either raising another person above yourself or lowering yourself below them. This sort of offends my sense of self in a way. Just because someone is my boss, doesn't mean they are better than me. As human beings, we are equals. That doesn't mean politeness has no place, but such elaborate forms of politeness seem unnecessary and a bit degrading to me.

Interestingly enough, that same day in my sociolinguistics class, we briefly discussed the fact that in most languages, women are more polite than men. Rachel and I decided that this was not really sexist. It's more that women are more passive aggressive so we can be mean and polite simultaneously.