I'm Illiterate Here (and it's really annoying)

            I’m not illiterate in the real sense of the word; I can read English, Arabic, and some Romance languages.  But I cannot read Hebrew, so I’m functionally illiterate in Israel.  Occasionally, I can match two written words together by looking at the shapes, but that requires having two copies of the same word and that both are in the same font.  Even in the Arab towns, everyone knows Hebrew, so that’s the language that’s used.  For names of stores, for labels, for caution signs.  It isn’t that I expect everything in the world to be labeled in English, but it is a very different experience and way to go about living.  Here are some weird ways that it has affected me thus far (with pictures where I could get them without being strange).

• Grocery Shopping- This is the task that's changed the most. One must go looking for the type of container that something is normally in, looking at the color of what’s inside and the picture on the front, and hope that it’s what you want.  Or ask the guy at the counter, who is usually very helpful and often speaks English.  I'm really thankful that I don't have any severe allergies, because I would have no way to ensure that I wasn't eating something dangerous.

So it looks like corn flakes. With honey

Yes! not only something I recognize, but something that tastes like home.
But apparently the stuff with the blue lid is crunchy.
I'll now have to write my shopping list based on lid colors.

Well, perhaps that'll be good, whatever it is (it wasn't)

Care to guess the brand?
The picture helps, but good luck figuring out the different flavors from a whole display.
Especially if you're picky

Aha!  It's a brand I know, with a picture I know, and at least some of it is written in English.
Brand name recognition is really useful



• Baking - I love to bake, but I was having trouble finding baking soda or baking powder (though I eventually found it).  One day in a grocery store I saw a pillsbury brownie mix, and thought that might be a good way to bake without trying to find ingredients (because I have to have the guy at the counter help me, because I can't read).  I looked at the back to see what you had to add, and promptly realized that this wasn't going to work so well either, due to the fact that the directions were all in Hebrew.  Without any pictures.  On the plus side, I'll learn to make everything from scratch.
• Caution Signs- what does the picture below say?  Is it a political sign or advertisement that got stuck there?  It is a caution sign saying “keep of the rocks”?  Your guess is a good as mine.  Luckily no one yelled at us.

• Directions- If I want to get the bus to go to Nazareth Illit or Kafr Kana (the biblical town of Canaa, by the way), I have to make sure I know the number and which side of the road to stand on.  The bus shelters have signs with the numbers on them to show which buses stop where, and presumably the name of where they're going written under it.  If I get confused, I just have to ask someone and hope that they're nice and helpful.

• Mail- I like to send snail mail, but so far I've been to the Post Office six times, and only succeeded in mailing something once.  Not only do I not know when the post office hours are, I can't read the days of the week on the sign with the hours, so I can only write down the times in a some sort of order, and try to guess at which day is which.  Today they were closed because of a holiday, but fortunately they had a sign in Arabic as well as Hebrew so I could read it and not walk all the way there tomorrow when they will still be closed.

• Signs- I tried to get into the pharmacy at the bottom of the hill this week and the doors had a great big red sign on them.  Perhaps a “do not enter” sign?  Or the name of the store that just happened to look really scary?  Luckily the security guard on the inside waved me through the door.  I’m still not sure if that’s the right place to go in or not.

• Bathrooms- thank goodness for the fairly-standard symbol for ‘restroom’, with the little stick figures, one of which has on a skirt.  However, signs are sometimes just words, which can be rather useless if you can’t read.  One time I and some friends successfully followed the symbols to a door with a little stick figure in a skirt on it.  But then there was a sign on the door, presumably saying that the bathroom was closed for some reason.  (Luckily there was a readable number on the door, so we were able to guess where we needed to go to find another bathroom)

I've always thought that reading was important and the most important part of school, but I never realized how much of my daily life revolves around reading.  I just finished college and want to go into academia, so I do spend time reading scholarly things, like books and journal articles.  I also enjoy reading for fun (since I now have the time), and I even have to read to know what's going on in the world (the news) and in my world of my friends and family (facebook).  An illiterate person is not only excluded from those things, they have to have an entirely different way of coping with daily life.  

Praying in a Different Language

            One of my favorite tasks here at the hospital is helping with the chaplains, who are local volunteers who go around the hospital to talk with patients and pray for them.  It is sometimes really hard, because people are often sad, lonely, or hurting in a hospital, and it’s all a bit outside of my comfort zone.  I’m not a medical person, and just being inside of a hospital is a little weird and uncomfortable.  Then trying to meet people that I don’t know and understanding them and their pain in Arabic adds another layer of complexity.  I am always with another local volunteer who can help me with the Arabic when I get confused, which helps a lot. 

My first week here, I would offer to pray for patients with the addendum “mumkin ana aslaha likii bil inglesia?”  “May I pray for you in English?”  A wonderful little old lady in the dialysis ward told me that in Arabic or English, God understands.  Still, I wanted to pray for them in a language that they knew, because I would find it a little weird for someone to be praying for me when I couldn’t understand them.  I talked to one of the local volunteers about wanting to learn to pray in Arabic, and I tried praying for her in Arabic.  She said it was fine, and that from then on I should pray in Arabic.  No more learning needed.  So that was that. 

It can be hard to pray in a foreign language.  I mostly sound like a five year old.  I’m sure that a lot of the verbs don’t get conjugated correctly.  I probably use the wrong words sometimes, or just make up words altogether.  Sometimes the other volunteers have to help me with words in the middle.  Some things are just too complicated for me to communicate well in Arabic.

And yet, God understands me.  My prayers are slow and halting and might cause an Arabic grammarian to fall over faint, but I’m talking to my God, and he understands.   As a Christian, this is so important for me to realize and think about.  God always understands our prayers.  Whether they’re beautiful works of poetry that rhyme, whether it’s a simple song from a child, whether it’s a nonsensical mutter in a foreign language, whether it’s a groan and a plea that no human words could ever describe, God understands.  The patients seem to understand me too, and seem to be aware that I’m not a native Arabic speaker.  And no one has yet commented on the American woman who goes around praying in Arabic.

 I’m learning that many of the things I pray for aren’t really all that complicated.  Thank you God for this person.  Thank you for their life.  Please heal them.  Please give them peace.  Please help them, because you love them.  In the name of Jesus the Messiah, Amen.  The most complicated thing that I’ve prayed for was for someone’s daughters to find husbands, and that was only hard because I needed to use the rare feminine plural verb conjugation.  I tend to think that prayers need to be complicated and specific, and there is a time and a place for that.  But sometimes, simple works just as well.

A note on why I chose to pray the way I do, as opposed to just learning the Lord’s Prayer or another pre-written one.  I did this on purpose.  The Lord’s Prayer and similar ones have a great purpose: to help us as the church pray as a unified body, and to help us individually pray when we can’t find words to say.  These are very important, and if you don’t know any, I would recommend that you learn one.  But prayer is our opportunity to talk to God.  To say, “Hi Dad”.  I call my earthly father just to talk about what’s going on in life, and I can do the same thing with God.  Think about that.  The God who created heaven and earth is willing to sit and talk with you.  About great big important things, like wars and famines, but also about little things, like missing home and being tired and cranky. I want my prayers to not only talk to God about this person, but to give them an idea of how to talk to God.  That you can talk to God about anything.  Yep, God doesn’t mind hearing about hopes that your daughters will find husbands and that he will make dialysis less painful in the same prayer.  And that there is so much to thank God for, even when you’re in the hospital.

Hopefully, my prayers will improve in their grammatical structures (though I will never bother with trying to speak proper classical Arabic), and my topics of prayer will expand a bit with my growing vocabulary.  If you speak a second language, I encourage you to try praying in a different language.  Not as a grammar exercise, but as a faith exercise in really thinking about your prayers.  Maybe it’ll be beautiful and make your French teacher proud.  Or maybe it’ll wind up as “Hi God, thanks, bye.”  Either way, God understands you and is happy to hear from you.

 

What Nazareth Looks Like

I've commented that it is a little weird to live in Nazareth, especially because most tourists see the basilica and Mary's Well and maybe the market, then leave after two hours.  I've been here for three and a half weeks, and I've only just gotten here.  I recently posted some 'tourist' pictures on my facebook, with the amendment that I rarely see these things, except as landmarks to use if I get lost.  This blog post is mostly pictures that show a little bit more of the place of where I live.

A Map

A map of Nazareth

This is map shows Nazareth Hospital (aka the English Hospital), which is where I live and work.  The Nazareth Village, right below our hospital, is a living history museum (like Colonial Williamsburg) that shows what first-century Nazareth would have looked like.  My apartment is on the hospital grounds, where I live with three other volunteers.  The hospital grounds are fairly big, and I live at the top.  On the map, it's between the Freres de Betharram Monastery (which I'm pretty sure is actually a convent, but maybe both are there and they just didn't label the convent) and the Carmelite Convent.

Nazareth
 If you look at the picture of Nazareth below, there's a big basilica in the middle (the Basilica of the Annunciation).  One the horizon, there's a shiny dome (a mosque), and to the left is a big church-looking building next to a long building.  That's the Salesian school, and how I can best find the hospital from far away.  The hospital is a little down and to the left, but it's not visible in this picture (sorry, google-ers can't be choosers).

Nazareth

Nazareth is basically in a bowl.  The Basilica and the main road are in the lowest and flattest part, and that's where first-century Nazareth was and where Jesus would have grown up.  It's a steep climb up from there to the hospital.  Once you get to the hospital, there are 189 steps from the hospital entrance to our apartment.

See what I met by steep?
(no, I didn't tilt the camera funny)

Above the bowl and on the other side of the mountain is Nazareth Illit, a predominately Jewish town.  It's listed as "Upper Nazareth" in the map.

The Hospital

A picture of the hospital, taken from Nazareth Village

This is the hospital, generally called the English Hospital (al-mustashfa al-inglesi in Arabic), officially Nazareth General Hospital EMMS (Edinburgh Medical Mission Society, who founded it).  There are wards, an emergency room, several outpatient offices, and a nursing school, as well as several Christian organizations that have offices here (including the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), which is the umbrella group of Intervarsity, the campus fellowship group I was a part of in college).

The hospital sign at the bottom of the hill

The view from the hospital is great, though the climb that makes it so spectacular doesn't feel so great while you're climbing up.

The view of Nazareth.
The cliff right above the lightpost is where they say that the people of Nazareth
were going to push Jesus' off when they didn't like him.
Mount Tabor is in that general direction, and if you go a short ways up the hill you can see it.

A view of Nazareth in the other direction

This is the view directly outside of my front door.  You can see the convent next door, and we hear their bells along with the bells of many other churches in the city.  And we even have trees!

Trees! and a convent

This last picture is of our balcony.  It's a nice place to sit, and also where we hang out laundry.  There are cats and a chicken that roam around the hospital, and this one is my favorite, even though he's always trying to get inside (and sometimes succeeding).

So this Nazareth.  Modern day, real, living, chaotic, steep, Nazareth.  Yep, Jesus did live here two thousand years ago.  And his presence is still present in the city.  And yet for me it is really easy to forget that Jesus did grow up here, because I see Nazareth as a place where people I know live.  And for the next six months, I live here too!

Half the World is Here

            I suppose that half the world does trudge though Nazareth on their tour buses, but I’m actually talking about a combined living and dining room in a couple’s house in Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth, the predominately Jewish town next door) that is turned into a church every Friday night.  They pulled out chairs from underneath their stairs to add to their regular furniture (they’d moved their dining room table someone else for the occasion).  This church serves Christians who are from a Jewish background, who wouldn’t normally go to an established local church down the hill in regular Nazareth because they don’t speak Arabic. 

            And then people came flooding in.  At least forty people, but all split into different groups for the purpose of translation.  One group was for the Spanish-speaking immigrants from various parts of South America. Another was for Russian-speaking immigrants from Russia and various other countries in the former USSR.  A smaller group was for those who didn’t speak the other languages but speak Hebrew pretty well, including some Arabic speakers who also know Hebrew.  Then there was my group, the smallest, made up of English speakers, and no two of us were from the same country.  Hence the remark that half of the world is sitting in the room.

            The man whose house we were at preached a sermon, but it took a bit longer than your traditional sermon.  He paused every phrase or so for the translation.  It was perhaps it bit chaotic, with this man preaching while the translators finished their sentence in a quieter voice, with several languages all being muttered at once.  But it was quite beautiful in a messy sort of way because it reflects God’s desire for the church: that it be made up of people from every tongue and tribe and nation. 

At the end they did prayer requests.  This isn’t really feasible in a large church, but it was small enough that everyone sort of knows each other.  If someone who speaks Russian had a prayer request, she would speak in Russian, then the Russian translator would translate into English, then everyone else would translate the English into the other languages. 

            I grew up in a fairly multi-national church in the United States, so I’m used to singing in different languages and occasionally hearing conversations in a strange language.  But this was something else entirely, because there wasn’t even a common language that everyone understood.  There is time to socialize afterwards, and trying to talk to people is difficult.  Some speak English, but many don’t.  I should probably brush up on my high school Spanish (who knew that would be useful in Israel?), and I’d like to learn some Hebrew as well because most people speak some Hebrew.  Still, I think some conversations shall have to wait to for Heaven, because I can’t learn every language in the six months I’m here.