June 8 - The Group Vs. FDOC

I thought jet lag was bad…until we started our first day of Arabic classes (FDOC = first day of classes) today. It is a four-hour mental marathon that is both something completely identical to and completely unlike physical exhaustion. Imagine your brain simultaneously understanding but not processing everything that is going on around you. John says it is like going to the gym for the first time in a while and finding out that your Arabic muscles aren’t as strong as you thought they were.

Our teachers at Al-Diwan were excellent, never switching to English to give us an easy way out. While I can’t speak for the rest of the group, I think I understood about 60-75% of what our teacher was saying at any given moment- and that’s a pretty good number. Max, Nusaibah, and I pushed our way through Chapter 15 in our book while also picking up a lot of new material (i.e. we discovered there are dual forms for pronouns aka pronouns for groups of two people). While I can’t say I was too excited about doing homework during my sacred summer months, I do indeed look forward to having class again tomorrow morning.

After a quick cab ride to St. Andrew’s- the primary NGO we will be working with- we had a second day of orientation activities. Today we learned about the services that AMERA (the African and Middle Eastern Refugee Assistance) can provide to refugees, such as legal and document services, psycho-social aid, protection, and sexual/gender based violence help. The presenter told us that her individual team works on about 8 cases every month, so we hope we can increase that number over the next few weeks by connecting refugees to the services that can help make their lives better. After a teaching and lesson-planning workshop, we split up and headed off to the sites we’ll be working at (look for another blog post from each group tonight about their individual sites).