SHARING A FEW KIND WORDS
English, Arabic speakers converse
In the wake of events in England and around the world, where more doors seem to be closing than opening, here, however small, is another kind of story. To those who would consider themselves hard-eyed realists, who feel the need for more doors, it’s laughably naive. The story’s name is Mary Leighton.
Leighton, 30, is a provincial organizer with the Dogwood Initiative, a non-profit group dedicated to promoting protective environmental legislation. Para- doxically, she is the daughter of an oil company engineer. When she was five, her father took a job in Saudi Arabia, and there the family lived in a compound with other Westerners.
She came away with two things from her years in Saudi Arabia. One, it inspired a love of languages, although her exposure to Arabic was so limited she learned only a few colloquialisms. Two, her life in the compound taught her something about isolation and living behind closed doors.
“It’s that classic thing where proximity doesn’t necessarily lead to integration or mutual exchange, which is what I think we’re facing in urban places all over the world right now — where we have this proximity and it feels very diverse, but our individual experiences don’t neces- sarily involve a lot of mixing.”
Late last year, when the first wave of Syrian refugees made their way to Canada, Leighton decided her background in education could be of help. In addition to her environmental work, she designed and taught language courses.
Language, she believed, could be a social bridge.
“With the influx of Syrian refugees and the outpouring of public desire to help, I thought it was a right time to try and start a language exchange program focusing on Arabic and English. So I started networking.”
She got a $2,500 grant from UBC’s Global Responses to the Refugee Crisis for rental costs and language materials. She found a meeting space at the Ajyal Islamic Centre in downtown Vancouver. She put the word out for participants. Twenty women signed up for the course — 10 English-speaking Canadians and 10 Arabic speakers. The participants were then divided into pairs — one English speaker to one Arabic speaker — and were told they would be responsible for each other’s instruction. Over the course’s 10-week term, each session would be divided in half between English speakers helping the Arabic speakers learn English, and then the Arabic speakers helping the English speakers learn Arabic.
For the English speakers, who knew little or no Arabic, it was tough going. But what they did find instructive were the Arabicspeaking women themselves. They hailed from Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq and Syria. They confounded stereotype. Several were professionals. Several were refugees. Hazar AlSibaai, a civil engineer, and her 16-year-old daughter, Sana AlAyoubi, were Syrians who had spent three years in a Jordanian refugee camp before coming to Canada. Michelle Kaczmarek, a master’s student in library and informa- tion studies at UBC, was partnered with Hazar, and Shalene Takara, a clinical counsellor, partnered Sana.
“I found them very friendly and incredibly joyous,” said Kaczmarek, “and the group very diverse as well. It was important to recognize that diversity in this massive Arabic-speaking world.”
“In every class we did,” Takara said, “we focused on a theme. One of them, for example, was about food, and Hazar and I talked about what we cooked, where we shopped, where we came from ... everyday things. It was quite playful and fun, and we joked a lot, and that part was unexpected for me. I think how much we shared beyond the language exchange came as a surprise.”
Hazar, whose English is halting, said she wanted to improve her English so she might go back to school and eventually find work as an engineer here. But that, she said, would be difficult. Sana, who took English in school in Syria, spoke much more fluently, and attends high school here now. (At one point, she brought in her physics homework so Kaczmarek could help her with it.) She took the class, she said, not only to improve her English but “to engage the community here.” She hopes to go on to university and become a pharmacologist.
But life here was very different from what she knew, she said. “It’s very difficult. I need time. It’s not just about the language; it’s everything that’s different.”
Not too much can be made of 10 weeks of language lessons, of course. A feel-good story is one thing, but it doesn’t make it any easier for Hazar to find work or Sana to pass her exams. It doesn’t guarantee what little Arabic they learned would stay with Kaczmarek or Takara, or that lasting relationships would blossom between any of the 20 women. It won’t stop wars, or doors from closing.
On the other hand, they were 20 women who, despite the cultural gulf, enjoyed each other’s company. And at the end of the last session, everyone stayed late after class, sat down to a meal and broke bread together.