Seven Day Forecast

            This past Wednesday, I was able to decide where to pack my coat (carry-on or checked), making the reality of going home very real.  I’m leaving Nazareth next week, and it’s weird. It’s weird to try and fit all of my possessions into my suitcases again, since they’ve been happily living in drawers in my apartment at the hospital.  It’s weird to try and pack food that I’ll miss, because at the same time I am really excited about the food I’ll get to eat when I go home too.  It’s weird to say goodbye, since the only reply to the question “when are you coming back?” is “Insha’allah”: “If God wills it”. 

            I am leaving about a week earlier than originally planned so that I can visit graduate school before I commit to moving somewhere for the next five years.  But even losing a week doesn’t change the pace that my time in Nazareth passed.  I can’t quite believe that I have spent six months in Nazareth, and the better part of a year out of the United States, away from everyone that I knew.  I thought that I would be really happy to go home.  I am; I can’t wait to see my parents, my family, various friends, and of course my dog.  At the same time, I didn’t realize how sad I would be to leave.  I’m made good friends here and found a place in my Christian family, even though I am away from my biological relatives. 

            I leave on Tuesday and arrive home on Wednesday. Then I will spend a couple days getting over jetlag and remembering how to speak English all the time, then fly to Texas to visit a grad school program.  After that, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing until I go to grad school in August.  Getting some sort of employment would be ideal, but otherwise I’ll catch up on sewing projects, prepare for grad school, and try not to drive my parents crazy. I do plan to keep posting to this blog, though a lot of what I’ll be writing about Nazareth.  I have a number of half-written blog posts that never got published between the internet not working and being really busy over the past couple of weeks. 

            I’m excited for what’s happening next, but it will take some time for me to readjust to live in the US again.  I haven’t driven in six months, or used a dryer, or done a million other things. I’ll need to make linguistics transitions as well, since now I try to speak Arabic with people I don’t know and can sometimes even cope in Hebrew.  Neither of those languages would be successful in little Hillsborough, NC. I will need to remember cultural things about the US (hugs instead of the kiss-on-each-cheek thing) and figure out reverse culture shock (personal displays of affection might top that list).  Thought my mom has done a good job of preparing me for changes at home, like hanging up a new picture at home and a new stop sign town in, there is a lot that I can’t really plan for. My Granny died while I was away, and while I know it mentally, it will be another thing entirely to visit my extended family without her presence.  I’ve changed some too, and I surely won’t realize how much until I get home.  All in all, I think I will find plenty to do over the next several months, and I am looking forward to coming home.  In the meantime, I need to finishing packing, saying goodbye, and enjoying my last three days in Nazareth.

             

God in the Dialysis Ward

           At least two days a week, I find myself in the dialysis ward at the hospital.  Dialysis is a medical process that allows people with kidney failure to stay alive, by cleaning their blood three times a week. It is generally a for-the-rest-of-your-life kind of medical treatment, so the patients spend three or four hours at the hospital three days a week. It’s exhausting for the patient and their family.  The machines are big and clunky, and you can see a ton of blood running through tubes, in and out of the machine, in and out of the patient.  On first glance, it doesn’t seem like a pleasant place to be.

            If you told me a year ago that I hanging out in the dialysis ward where I see tons of blood, I’d have said that you’d lost your mind.  I dislike blood and faint easily.  I can’t stand someone talking about blood and needles for long, much less looking at it.  But God had other plans, and I ended up visiting the dialysis ward on one of my first days at the hospital.  After about ten minutes I got very hot and felt a little funny, so I had to go find some water and sit down for a little while.  Then I stood back up, didn’t fall over, and went back in.  I haven’t had any problems since, which is a sure sign that God is bigger than me and a silly little thing like ‘prone to fainting’.

            Being in the dialysis ward is challenging even once I stop thinking about all of the blood.  I go there as part of the chaplaincy team to visit the patients and pray with them.  Many of the patients are very old, and all of them are pretty sick.  They have other medical problems in addition to their kidneys, and depression is common.  It’s not an easy or happy place.  We try to bring a bit of sunshine in.  Sometimes we sing or bring sweets, but most of the time we just come and say hi.  We listen to their problems and pray for them.  I usually try to talk to them, since I speak some Arabic.  Some of the other volunteers give hand massages. We try to be present with the patients in their suffering. 

            We do this because there is a biblical precedent for visiting the sick.  In Matthew 22:34-45, Jesus talks about visiting the sick in addition to several other parts of caring for the outcasts in our community.  Even more importantly, Jesus modeled this during his time on earth.  He did spend time doing things like preaching in the synagogues and arguing with religious elders.  But he also spent time in the real world, with the outcasts and the suffering.  Jesus’ role in visiting the sick was a little different than mine; he can heal miraculously.  Still, he didn’t heal in a distant, nice-lightning-strike, manner.  He reached his hand out to the sick, whether they were the sick in spirit or the physically sick.  Chaplaincy at the hospital is a bit like this.  We can’t heal in quite the same way, but we try to reach out a hand to show them that they are not alone in their pain.

            In the dialysis ward, with the blood pumping through machines and sleeping patients, I’ve seen a bit of God and his purpose for our world.  As a Christian, I cannot fix all that is wrong in the world. Pain, suffering, and death with always be around.  But we can show God’s love in those situations, whatever and wherever they may be. Many people come to Nazareth as part of their pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Land’.  They come to see the massive basilica and the ruins of first-century Nazareth under it.  The church is beautiful and most of the ‘holy sights’ are worth seeing, but that doesn’t sum up my experience in Nazareth.

Yes, God is surely present in the beautiful church buildings with the light streaming through the stain-glass windows.  Yet God also shines out of the eyes of the little old lady in the dialysis ward when she listens to her solar-powered audio-bible.  He lights up a dark place when a foreign gives the women hand massages, because they know who she is and why she’s there and that she comes to care for them.  His love glimmers when we stumble through transliterated songs in Arabic for the patients. I’ve seen God the most in the dialysis ward in Nazareth, even though you can’t see the basilica out the window.

           

Singing in Arabic (aka cross-linguistic multitasking)

            It’s common for Christians to sing worship songs in most church services, and services in Nazareth are no different.  Since everyone here speaks Arabic, the songs are usually done in Arabic as well.  Which is great, because the songs are beautiful and it would be weird to sing in a foreign language that no one understood.  However, trying to sing in Arabic is a linguistic challenge for a non-native speaker.

            One of the hardest problems is reading the words to the songs, whether in a hymnal or on a projector screen.  I can read Arabic reasonably well, but I’m still a slow reader unless I recognize words. Trying to sound out the words while carrying a tune is really difficult. The font can also be a problem. Sometimes it’s just that the font is too small for me to see easily.  Sometimes the dots over or under letters are too faint to read (try to imagine reading English without any horizontal lines.  You can’t tell if a letter is a ‘t’ or ‘f’ or ‘l’).  Sometimes the letters are ‘stacked’ on top of each other, kind of like fancy calligraphy, except that certain fonts do it of their own accord. 

To make it even more difficult, Arabic doesn’t write vowels*.  You know how some people use text message speak to make a text shorter? (not me, because I’m weird and like to spell out ‘okay’, but plenty of other people)  “Text message” becomes something like “txt mssg”, because you get rid of all the vowels.  That’s how ALL Arabic works (except for religious texts, which have them so that you can’t mess with the meaning by changing the vowels).  In daily life this isn’t really a problem, but it can be when you’re singing.  Songs are in this funny region between really fancy formal Arabic and the daily dialects, except they will sometimes mix the two together to make the words fit the tune better, in a similar way to how ‘ever’ gets shortened to ‘e’er’ or extra syllables get added in hymns.  The pesky case endings system I had to learn in college, which is only useful if you become an Al-Jeezera news broadcaster, actually matters sometimes. It’s not as simple as using case endings in one song but not in another.  You have to pay attention to what everyone else is singing, and follow them.

An added complication is that one letter can indicate several different sounds. It’s because different Arabic dialects have undergone different sound changes.  For example, there is one sound written with one letter that is generally pronounced like the first sound in ‘judge’.  Unless you’re from Egypt, in which case every single instance of that ‘j’ sound is produced like the first sound in ‘goat’.  So jamila ‘pretty’ becomes gamila, and it means that same thing.  That doesn’t seem to too hard.  Except that in other places, a different letter becomes a ‘g’.  In daily life, pretty much everyone speaks the same dialect, so this isn't really a problem and allows you to easily tell where people are from.  Songs are often in different dialects (such as singing Egyptian songs in Nazareth) or even in standard Arabic, but they are all written with the exact same alphabet.  So one word, written in the exact same way, could be pronounced three different ways, depending on where the song is from.  Those three ways are also without the case endings.  So in addition to trying to read quickly and figure out the vowels, you also have to identify the dialect and revert to the correct pronunciation of the sounds, because it won’t fit the music correctly otherwise.

I also find it hard to pronounce some sounds in Arabic.  There are at least 7 sounds that Arabic uses that aren’t found in English, and they’re all produced at the back of your throat. (If you were thinking of learning Arabic, I hope I haven’t scared you off) I was trying to explain one of them at the dinner table and another volunteer thought I was choking.  I can produce most of them in isolation, but it’s still hard to use them in the middle of a word.  Trying to make them while I’m singing is next to impossible.  Especially when I’m trying to make sure that I use the right version of the weird sound and pretend I can carry a tune, all at the same time.

On top of all of the linguistic difficulties of singing in a foreign language, there are also musical hurdles.  I’m not a musician (I can barely carry a tune), but Arabic singing has a different type of sound.  The notes are the same (I think), but there is something different about it.  If you want any more explanation, you’ll have to ask a musician.  For me, it means trying to match an unfamiliar way of singing.  The structure of songs can also be different.  If a song in English has a chorus, we sing the first verse, and then the chorus, and end with the chorus after the last verse.  In Arabic songs, you seem to begin and end with the chorus. 

On the plus side of this craziness, I’m getting a little better.  My reading skills have gotten much faster, though I'm still hopeless without the dots.  I now even prefer to read the song in Arabic instead of transliterated into English letters. I understand the words better this way, and seeing the morpheme boundaries helps me figure out the tune.   There are songs that I recognize and can even sing bits of them without the words written out.  Now fast songs and long words are the problem, but perhaps that'll improve too.  Still, I'm waiting for the day when I can sing in Arabic (with all that involves) and clap at the same time.  

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* That’s an oversimplification.  Arabic has two types of vowels: long vowels and short vowels.  Long vowels are written, but they seem to be a fairly small percentage of vowels (no I have not counted, I’m not in school).  To be totally true, short vowels in Arabic aren’t written.

Where's Home?

            I’ve now been outside of the US for four months.  The first three months were spent in Nazareth, and then I went to Europe to travel and visit friends.  Now I’m back in Nazareth for another three months. All of this being away from home has made me think about what ‘home’ is.  Growing up, my definition of home was fairly stationary.  I have lived in the same big yellow house for my whole life.  My parents lived there before I was born and they still live there now.  I remember the address with the little ditty I learned when I was five years old. 

            At eighteen I went away to college, and then my definition of ‘home’ got a little confused.  There was where-I-grew-up home and where-I-live-now home.  They were pretty different.  College started out as new and very strange, but I quickly made good friends and an even larger pool of acquaintances.  I got to know people at church from outside of my peer group and I’d run into them at the grocery store.  I learned to live my life there.  Where the post office and bank were, where to go with my friends, where to study.  My family and some old friends were at home, but I didn’t quite belong there anymore.  I remember talking with a friend about three days into a month-long Christmas break during my first year of college.  We were both ready to go back.  ‘Home’ felt a little strange now.  This was how most of college felt, with school increasingly feeling like home.

            Except that graduation came.  William and Mary isn’t home anymore, and as much as I like visiting, it never will be again.  The people that made it home aren’t there anymore.  I moved ‘home’ to North Carolina, but only to work for the summer at camp and get ready to leave again.  At first, Nazareth was really strange.  I had to figure out where to get food and shampoo, how to heat my apartment, and find new friends and a new church, in a different country using a different language. It was a lot of change all at once.

I didn’t realize how much Nazareth had become home until I was in Europe.  One of the first things I realized was that I didn’t know how to cross the street any more.  In Nazareth, there aren’t really any cross walk signs.  You just look to make sure that people have the time, and the inclination, to stop before you just go.  But in Europe they have the fancy green-man-means-walk signs.  And people even generally follow them, with the added risk of getting hit by a car if you don’t obey them.  I got really excited when I heard people speaking Arabic, and not just because I could eavesdrop.  It was the same excitement I feel when I hear Americans, because it’s familiar.  When I was really hungry and cranky and not inclined to try anything new, hamburgers, pasta, falafel, and schwarma all counted as comfort food.  I even had reverse culture shock from large groups of loud American tourists.  My home in the US felt increasingly far away. 

When I came back to Nazareth, the airport was familiar and I knew where the taxi was taking me.  The first day back I had no trouble running to the grocery store.  I’ve seen lots of people I know who were happy that I was back.  Someone that I apparently know yelled and waved at me out the window of the car (I couldn’t figure out who it was). I’ve fallen back into speaking Arabic and am more willing to explain that I don’t speak Hebrew than I was with other languages in Europe.  Yet I am still looking forward to going home to the US to see my family and friends and eat barbeque again.

So where is my home now? What makes a place your home?  I know people here in Nazareth, it’s where some of my stuff is, and I feel very happy and comfortable here.  My home at William and Mary has been scattered, so little bits of that home are with my follow TWAMPs (typical William and Mary person). Legally my home is in North Carolina, and that’s where my family is and where I speak my native language. Given all of these competing forces, I feel a little bit stateless.  I don’t exactly belong anywhere right now.  Here, I’m still the random white American who speaks Arabic.  At home, I’m mostly my parents’ child.  That’s fine and I love them dearly, but it’s weird when most of the people I know are my parents’ friends.  I don’t belong at William and Mary anymore either.  Seeing as I have applied to graduate schools all over the US, I have no idea where I’ll be this time next year either.

I still don’t have an answer, but this thought process has made me focus a little more on my permanent home.  I’m a Christian, which has lots of different implications, but one thing is that I’m not only an American citizen, but a citizen of God’s kingdom as well.   If, for whatever reason, my American* label was no longer relevant, I’d still be a citizen of God’s kingdom. At this point, I have no clue where life will lead me.  I could end up living down the street from where I grew up or halfway around the world. But in the midst of all of this confusion, I know my final destination. How I get there is just part of the adventure. 

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* I do really like the US, which I realize the more time I spend in other places.  Also, the Olympics are coming up, so I’m rather patriotic right now.