I Get Off My Lazy طيز

So I've decided to stop being a leech on society. A fellow Fulbrighter put me in touch with a woman who runs a weekend school for Iraqi children, so now I volunteer teaching English there. Friday was my first day.

The school is in the woman's one-room apartment in Saida Zayneb, an area outside of Damascus which is very poor, has quite a lot of Iraqi refugees, and is famous for the Saida Zayneb mosque, the main attraction for Iranian pilgrims to Syria. It takes less than an hour to get there. Saturday I went back and taught the same group of girls from before, plus two more classes. 6 hours after I had arrived, the woman who runs it was thanking me profusely as I left and I felt, well, good. "Skukran jazeelan" (thank you very much) said the woman, to which I replied "Skukran lilforsa" (thanks for the opportunity).

The students were divided among the teachers haphazardly, and I had no idea of their levels prior to beginning class so everthing was completely off-the-cuff. Their English was also so poor that I had to speak almost entirely in Arabic, following up every English sentence or word with the meaning in Arabic. The students are harder to understand than most people I interact with since I'm so unfamiliar with the Iraqi dialect and accent, but I expect this will improve. Both days, there were some French journalists buzzing about taking pictures and talking to the main woman.

Most of the girls are from Baghdad. One of the lessons on Saturday I worked one-on-one with a 14-year-old girl, who is very behind in English. Most of the students are, as Syrian schools start English a full two or three years before Iraqi schools, plus many missed a lot of school because of the war. The girl asked me if I spoke "logha ajnabia" (foreign language - English) well, and how I knew it, so I told her I was from America. Really? She asked. Is America nice? Do your parents live there? Is America pretty?

I'm never embarrassed or reticent about telling people I am from the US, except in this situation. I know they know that I am not the US government, and are obviously not going to turn on me because of my blue passport, but still I feel somewhat responsible. My friends, my neighbors, some of my family supported Bush or the war, and I don't think I can absolve myself of all responsibility just by the fact I didn't vote for Bush.

The last class on Saturday was for older girls more advanced in English. The way English is taught in school here drills the grammer but skips over conversation and listening, so I was trying to get them talking. They told me about their families. The girl who is the best in English informed me, "My family from Baghdad, and I have four brother- no, three brother now, one died, and a sister." I didn't ask how.