I love teaching, i love the classroom, i love the students, and i hate to admit it but a part of me loves the chaos and the noise (though there’s been many times i’ve done silent and loud prayers alike wishing and craving peace and quiet from the sheer volume of ..kids, many many many many kids, each outshouting each other simultaneously drowning out your personal sanity) and i always fumble with words trying to articulate what it is about the teacher/student/classroom dynamic that i find so enthralling and so incredibly and powerfully amazing. it is such human to human connection, on an indescribable level. Teaching is almost an excuse for me to connect with people, with kids, with families.
I was humbled to receive some endearing emails from parents of students while i was at Jordan, wondering where I was, how I was doing and when I was coming back. I was even more humbled last Wednesday when a family that I am particularly fond of invited me and my roommate to join them for an Iftaar dinner. “The kids missed you so much. Please Ms. Fahmida won’t you join us on Friday for Iftaar with the family?” It was simply gracious. Sidenote : I love the slightly awkard but really heart warming formality that seeps into the English that second language English speakers speak with.
I think of this family as the “Gaza Brady Bunch Family”. There are six kids. The very first time I had met them, I was sandwiched in between the 11 year old daughter and the 14 year old son in the backseat with Maggie in the front, and the 8 year old twin brothers in the back back of the car going to their house to tutor them for the first time (I’d be tutoring the 11 year old, and later the 14 year old, on a biweekly pattern). Entering their home, I was surprised at the number of bedrooms and realized that there were 2 more children in the house, one 14 year old daughter and another 17 year old son. After getting used to the routine of going to their house every Tuesday and Thursday evening, pretty soon Maggie and I would find ourselves sitting on their couch, with the whole family watching Spongebob in Arabic (or some other cartoon).
They moved to Ramallah after the massacre in Gaza a couple of years ago. One of the very very few lucky ones to have even been able to move out. And what is extremely interesting to me is each of the kids respective views on Gaza. They all miss it terribly, and as one of the kids described, she said that she saw Gaza turn from heaven to hell.
A quirk about being a part of a Brady bunch family is also seeing the respective talents of each kid. They’ve got scientists, phenomenal singing writing and fashion designing talents all under one roof.
Seeing them after a whole summer was a treat in and of itself. A homemade iftaar on top of that? man. It’s hard to understand a culture without understanding the deliciousness of home cooking sitting at the dining table with a family. My roommate and I devoured a deliciously whole baked fish stuffed with garlic after a bowl of warm soup with a side of bread and muttabl (like baba ghanouj, an egglplant dish) and we gulped down Kharoub, a special Ramadan drink (kind of like Tamar Hindi, except the taste of this sweet drink is something that i have never tasted before so i couldnt even describe to you the unique crisp and sweet taste buds it hit on my taste pallete, which the dad had made, homemade). And of course, after the full course meal, came a giant dish of homemade..qatayef :)
We were joined by two of their other family members, who had just arrived from Gaza to Ramallah just a couple of days ago. They were able to come on a medical exempt. It was the dad’s cousin, an elderly-ish woman, who didn’t speak any English (whiich was good for me, the summer of Arabic learning spent in Jordan, was being put to the test as I tried to understand her conversation). My roommate and I listened to her and her daughter, talking about a variety of things in regards to Gaza. About how awful it was to fast with electricity cuts in this heat for example, amongst other things.
It took some time, (maybe an hour or so) to warm up to them and them to us, but pretty soon the elderly-ish cousin of the father was exchanging smiles, smirks and jokes and laughs with us. My problem with Arabic is that I know a giant collection of words that float around in my head, and they always hang loose because I am never quick enough to string them together in a coherent sentence to have fluent conversations. So during dinner, I don’t know how many times I said “ zaki! zakkiii! zakii iktheer!!” (translation : tasty! tastyyy! really tastyyy!) until the cousin looked at me with a motherly smile on her face and finally said “Inti zaki!” (inti = you, zaki = good..tasty lol) She told me that she had lived in Libya for 17 years and her neighbors were, lo and behold, Bangladeshi (we are indeed everywhere) and she asked why I don’t wear that thing that they wrap around. Saris..I told her no, I don’t wear saris in ramallah. And I thought to myself the comical scene of me rolling up to work in a sari, as the parents had already had an issue with me being an English teacher looking “Indian”, sort of apprehensive that I’d be teaching their kids the Indian accent.
In the very short time that we had known each other, these two family members from Gaza, showed me the kind of love that I get when I go back to Bangladesh, how an elderly distant relative treats you endearingly with a smile and a hug, whe they cup their hands around your face in a very loving way. She flipped through a small picture wallet and showed me a picture of her husband, her three daughters and her son and a younger picture of herself. When I would say “helu iktheer!” (really nice/ really beautiful!/ how nice!) she would reply back with a laugh saying “inti helu!”. We joked around for a bit before taking a group picture and she jokingly and lovingly hugged me tight as we posed with the cheesy smiles.
I took one helping of qatayef because I was already stuffed. And when I only took one, she (the elderly-ish cousin) looked at me with displeasure and said “don’t you know it’s sunnah to eat two? of course you have to eat another one”. that’s how they get you I swear, to be so overly stuffed that you can’t move. They tell you it’s Sunnah lol (sunnah = ways of the Prophet). You can’t argue with that somehow. “Well if it’s sunnah, i guess i HAVE to eat another one!” is what you end up thinking and doing. A tray of coffee came along after that. And it smelled awesome. And I was so happy to drink coffee finally to get rid of the overpowering sweetness on my tongue. My roommate and I smelled the coffee, and as I was drinking it, I personally couldn’t spot why it tasted so good but different, until my roomate was like “..I think this is American coffee”. THAT was a treat, which made me think “whoaa...hey there! haven’t tasted this stuff in over 8 months!”. The dad, not knowing that my roommate and I had this exchange of dialogue, told us that this is an American brand of coffee and brought out a bag of Kroger’s Brand 100% Columbian bean coffee bag. Filtered American black coffee...never thought that I’d actually enjoy drinking black coffee. But when I can drink black coffee (something that I could never stand doing before, not even half a sip) and think that it’s absolutely fine without sugar, I know that my taste pallate has definitely re-adjusted to the strenght of espresso shot style Arab coffee. I guess I can thank Umm Rami for that adjustment, having to drink her coffee twice a day, every day for a month :)
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