Blinders

The view of the Mediterranean Sea from our kitchen window

1.Blinders (8 March 2017)

            It’s been five weeks and a day since Maria and I landed in the new place we call “home”. It’s a brand-new, familiar place. Beirut has been our home for nearly eleven years of our married life, and for Maria another seventeen from her birth until her emigration to Canada. We’ve been working pretty hard to fit ourselves in to the pace and style of life here. But there’s got to be a lot more retooling of our lives as we move along.

            It’s been four weeks minus a day since I started taking Conversational Arabic lessons, and today I had an experience that revealed just how much retooling I need. I’m in a class with mostly Europeans, and a few Americans thrown in there just for fun. We were reading a paragraph about “Karim”, and his work and eating schedule, something that could plausibly be part of any conversation outside the classroom as well. In Lebanon there’s very little that remains “private” (in the Western sense). The teacher had us write answers to questions about the text, in order to see just how much we were comprehending. “Karim goes to work at 7:14 each day.” I think to myself, why does she keep saying “a quarter after 7” when the text clearly states 7:14? Ah… my first bit of retooling for the day. Even if it says “7:14”, in Lebanon you don’t say the exact time – just the approximate time. OK, 7:15 it is.

            We went on to answer other questions. How long Karim works each day. When he comes home. With whom he eats. His meal times. The text says that he goes to work at “7:15”, then has his breakfast at 8. But my (Western) brain turned that around, and so I wrote: “Karim has breakfast at 7:15 and goes to work at 8.” Our teacher looked at me and said, “No…! of course not! He goes to work shee (“let’s say”) a half-hour early, and then he has his breakfast. When you get up, don’t you have your coffee (Arabic, of course)? Then you get hungry about 8.”

            Well, it’s true. In the mornings, I don’t eat breakfast because I’m hungry. I eat because that’s “what you’re supposed to do” (read: “what Americans do”). And then I get hungry mid-morning anyway, and go buy a man2ouché.

            This knocked me for a loop this morning. My cultural blinders got in the way of my learning. Over the years I’ve worked hard to teach people not to impose their cultural biases on biblical texts, but rather to let the Bible speak for itself. But here I was, thirty-six days after landing in our new life, messing with Karim’s life/work schedule, and implicitly telling all of Lebanon what it “should” be doing. I’d better include more deep breaths in my daily routine…

            Since Beirut is literally crawling with cats, and since most of my family is allergic to all but the digital kind, I’m going to include my photos of “LebCats” with my posts, as often as I can. Feel free to caption or even name them! [LNB]