Minding my ن s and ب s

It has been so cool lately that I feel like we have all been making up for those sleepless, sweat-drenched nights of a few months ago. The sunrise hardly makes a ripple on the surface of my sleep in the mornings, and throughout the day vague memories of dreams drift across my mind in fragments – pieces of the kind of lives lived only under miles of deep slumber. Even Asad only stumbles onto the back porch well after breakfast, bleary-eyed and groggy and Nimir, who has recently struck up an affair with the pretty black and white cat next door, is dead to the world until at least three o’clock in the afternoon. Only the chickens seem to be willfully up at a reasonable hour these days, and all nine of them follow us with an air of disgust from tent to bathroom to kitchen until they get their breakfast of sorghum and sesame seeds.

We’ve bumped our language lessons up to four times a week now (which may be a more rational explanation for my increased desire for sleep.) Arabic language learning continues to be the source of my greatest sense of accomplishment and my deepest discouragement. There are days in conversations when all the “random” questions fall just right and gullible people exclaim, “Wow, you know Arabic so well!” And then there are those days when the most basic and childlike request is so completely void from my vocabulary and grammatical awareness that you would never in your wildest dreams imagine I have lived here for a year. (And that is not false modesty.) Sometimes I console myself with the thought that learning a new language in our case has come complete with a new script that goes from right to left and a twenty eight letter alphabet, each of whose symbols have three unique forms. Though I know we sound like eight year olds trudging our way through Fun With Dick and Jane (in our case Ahmed and Zainab, actually), we really can read a lot of things now, albeit belabored. And the other day, when our teacher asked simple questions to which we wrote out full-sentence answers on lined paper, he could read our answers, even through his chuckles. So we are making progress, though I often worry it’s slower than it should be. (I should clarify that I am speaking only for myself here. Being married to a freak-of-nature-language-learner is a two-sided coin. And I say that with the deepest affection.) One thing that eases my mind however, especially on bad language learning days, is to think of how much better I will be at teaching other adults how to read and write because of this experience. I don’t remember becoming literate the first time I did it. But I am quite certain this second go around will stick with me for quite awhile. From now on, I will always have great admiration and empathy for that person awkwardly grasping a pen, tongue sticking out as they shakily struggle to curl an unfamiliar shape. Because right now, that person is me.