Repeat After Me: ana baHki shway arabi (I Speak a Little Arabic)
by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director
It feels like my life is a series of feeble attempts to thank people for their incredible generosity: The sweet family that took a shy American student into their home in Fes, Morocco; every single donor who keeps LHI afloat; the many LHI volunteers and leadership team members who pour so much of their love and intelligence into our programs. The list goes on and on.
Hayley (top) teaches an online Arabic class for three LHI volunteers.
So, when the COVID-19 quarantine started in March, it seemed like a good time to offer remote Arabic classes to LHI volunteers, both past and present, as a way to thank them for their time spent at the LHI Refugee Center in Greece. Many had previously expressed interest in learning Arabic, since it is an especially helpful language to know in the humanitarian field.
15 students and two months later, our classes are still going strong, and the students are making amazing progress!
Why Arabic?
Ever since I started learning Arabic at college (it was a toss up between Arabic, Gothic literature, and indoor volleyball: no-brainer), it has changed my life in ways I never could’ve anticipated. The most powerful way hands down is the unmatched hospitality and depth of friendship that the Arab culture is famous for. And being able to speak Arabic bridges a massive communication and cultural gap that can exist between humanitarians and beneficiaries.
One reason LHI even exists is because of honest and open conversations I’ve had with Arabic-speaking refugees, who were able to express in their own words what they needed in order to survive (both physically and psychologically) years of living in a painful limbo.
Classes
Hayley uses worksheets like this to help her students learn Arabic.
Since the beginning of April, I’ve been teaching 15 students divided between two classes of LHI volunteers. It’s a fast-paced course in both writing and speaking Levantine Arabic, the dialect widely spoken in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. There aren’t a lot of resources for teaching this dialect, so it does require some lesson planning and creating accessible and fun audio resources.
At the end of the day, the course is a good foundation on which to build in the future. It also has helped us all get through quarantine. Rosie, who has volunteered at the LHI Refugee Center, is taking the course: “No matter what people learn or take away from Arabic classes, the course gives me structure, a break from lockdown, a chance to see different faces, to train the brain, something to focus on, a purpose and sense of achieving something during lockdown.”
So, repeat after me:
ana baHki shway arabi (I speak a little Arabic)
أنا بَحْكي شَوي عَرَبي.
Stay tuned for the next installment of our “We Keep Going” blog series to learn more about how LHI continues our mission to help refugees at home and abroad in the midst of a global pandemic.