Madri Arabic (My spelling for “I don’t know Arabic”)

During my first three weeks in Saudi Arabia I knew how to say two words in Arabic: please and thank you. No one here ever says please, but thank you came in handy quite a bit. I thanked the man bagging my groceries, the man driving me to the mall, and I awkwardly thanked the lady who gave me her pink sequined slippers after I told her that I liked them. Those first three weeks I sincerely believed that Saudis spoke English as fluently as Europeans, and I could get away without learning much Arabic here.

That beautiful dream ended in a rude awakening when I began working with patients. On my first day of unit orientation, not one of my patients nor any of their family members knew English. Not only that, but none of them played charades. One patient rang his call bell so I answered, hoping that it was an IV pump dinging or something obvious, but no luck. He garbled something out, noticed my blank stare and lack of movement, then pulled the classic trick of saying the same thing louder and slower, thinking maybe I might have a hearing problem rather than an enormous language barrier. I told my preceptor that she needed to check out the situation. Turns out the guy wanted the remote control that was on the other side of the room. Gees! Two simple gestures could have taken care of his problem. Looks like I had to learn Arabic after all.

I enrolled in the next available Arabic class, then began learning the language the old fashioned way. I spent as much time at work as possible learning Arabic from my coworkers. My scratch paper collection with Arabic words on it grew, and within a month I could get by without a translator most of the time. Not only that, but I didn’t speak to my patients in broken Spanish out of habit nearly as much as I did at first!

Arabic class started off great. The instructor, Khadezia, wore a black head scarf and abaya, but helped us out by not covering her face. It helps to see someone’s lips when you’re learning a new language, so that small gesture was nice. For the next three hours we saw her chapped lips and yellow teeth form all the foreign sounds and did our best to follow along. She taught us all the various ways of saying “th,” “k” and “h,” and she adjusted everyone’s names to suit her pronunciation. On my first day of class I sat next to my friends Jill and Hayley. By the end of the class, their names were Jen and Holly, and I was Mary. Khadezia walked us through the ABC’s of Arabic, and by the third lesson we were sounding out words almost as good as any first grader. It’s kinda tricky, though, since all the writing is in cursive. Dots, curves and occasional vertical lines try their best to make letters look distinct, but all in all it’s one beautiful puzzle that I struggle to understand. By our third lesson, she really thought we knew our stuff. At one point, she went up to the white board and wrote some elegant phrase that sprawled out over half the length of the wall.

I sat there thinking, “Show off!”

She slowly spun herself around and said, “This simple sentence says ‘The boy ate the apple.’”

That’s about the time I knew I would drop out. Missing the next two lessons only helped solidify that decision.

Over the next couple weeks, I realized just how little you really need to know to get your point across. My vocabulary involves nouns, verbs and a few adjectives, no pronouns or prepositions, and I’m doing just fine. If you ask, “want new sheets?” you’re understood as well as if you would say, “I have some new sheets for you.” Lack of vocabulary stimulates my creativity and probably keeps me out of trouble. Awhile back, instead of telling a patient that their doctor sucked, I simply told them that their doctor wasn’t good. That’s nicer, anyway, even though “sucked” was much more appropriate.

Over the next month or so I might get back to learning Arabic. Maybe six months from now I’ll know how to gracefully connect verbs with nouns. Until then, I’ll pull the sour grapes routine and think people who speak Arabic intelligently are just showing off.

Yakel Akel (my Arabic for “To Eat Food”)

When I return home, I’ll think about this place and miss the food. In the past three months I’ve stuffed my face full of dates, coffee from cardamom, unusual fruit juices, olives, honey, pastries with pistachios, creamy dairy products, hummus and its look-alikes, and all that delicious Arabic bread that nearly yanks your teeth out when you bite it. I’ve even done the near-impossible: polished off an entire gallon of buttermilk by myself in less than two weeks! Yeah. I know. I still can’t believe it, either. It’s just so surprisingly delicious if you dump in raspberry juice.

I’ll miss all those foods, but even more than that, I’ll miss the memories that have nothing to do with typical Middle Eastern foods and everything to do with my experience here. King Faisal Hospital’s social scene almost always involves food, as any good social scene should. The only difference is that unlike most social scenes I’m used to, this one comes with a strong, authentic international taste that I can’t find in most places I’ve called home. My new friends here come from all over the world, and we all share our favorite dishes with each other. Foods that I’ve only eaten in restaurants seem so natural for them to cook, probably because their mothers taught them how to cook it when they were little and they’ve been making it ever since. The lack of exotic pretense erases all the food’s elegance, and replaces it with an extra helping of "cool." The fact that people really eat like that every day adds to the overall experience of living somewhere far, far away. The assortment of layers, flavors and spices in both food and cultures adds to the fun of my adventure.

When I’m the only American in a room eating something distinctly un-American, I sometimes get a little tingly thinking how surreal my life feels. Even little things, like drinking English Breakfast tea with an English woman makes me smile. Admittedly, my ingrained inhibitions can’t always stomach all the international flair, like eating jazzed up beef liver for breakfast or something overly chewy from a mysterious place in a cow’s GI tract, but cooking for myself long enough stamped out all the picky eating habits I enjoyed as a kid. I’ve done a good job of eating everything I see, even if I have a sneaky suspicion that I won’t like it. Those times I don’t mind being wrong, and lucky for me. It would suck if I missed out on a delicious glass or ten of buttermilk mixed with raspberry juice!