Family Matters

I wore a t-shirt in the house, for the first time since I arrived, the other day after walking home from yoga and for the next 24 hours, every time I saw Philip, the father, he made a comment on either a) how if I have any problems I can ask him for help or b) how great it was to see me eating (and I was only eating a carrot at the time). When he saw me eating breakfast the next morning he put his arm on my shoulder and said “It is necessary that you put flesh here and here and here” pointing to various parts of my back. I don’t know exactly what he was hinting at, but never fear, I eat very well here.

This past week for lunch we have had okra/parsley/tomato/lemon/garlic over rice pilaf; carrots/onions/artichokes stewed in lemon/garlic/olive oil with lentil soup; rice with ground meat (like hasweh) and green fool & tabbouleh; stuffed grape leaves; football shaped kibbe made from potato but stuffed with lamb and walnuts; football shaped kibbe made from potato, stuffed with diced potatoes in a sour-ish sauce eaten with more of the same potato sauce; fool bi-tabbouleh; radish salad (grated radish in lemon and garlic dressing) and so on and so forth. Sunday night we even had cheesecake! for Philip’s birthday. Leila had never made (or eaten) cheesecake before and they certainly don’t have it (or cream cheese) here but she made an interesting version of it with Laughing Cow cheese (they call it Qui Rit, “keeree” cheese) and a cookie bottom with strawberry jam on top.

In general, my only complaint about the food here is that there is not always dinner—generally it is leftovers/eat what you like, but if there are no leftovers and I don’t want to eat bread and cheese or lubneh for two meals a day, there is always my fallback plan of a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Since I pay them for food I don’t want to have to go out to buy something else, yet I don’t know exactly how to ask, so…what’s for dinner? if there is nothing prepared in the fridge. One of the other students in my class said she has a similar problem living with a family, though hers is more drastic because she really only gets one meal a day (lunch). The family she lives with is poorer (the 3 kids sleep in one room and the parents on the living room floor) and though she pays more than I do she feels guilty asking them to prepare her extra food. Therefore she supplements the food they give her with extra snacks and breakfast foods and fruit and such.

Today I came home after class and for the first time in a long time the whole family was home together for lunch. We had baked spaghetti and luban and for dessert something made from tahini-lemon-sugar-vanilla-pistachios that I forget the name of. The father told me that they were planning to go to the mother’s home village this weekend to visit her mother and go out to a local restaurant where they make food from the time “before Noah.” Noah’s Ark, that is. And of course I should join them because the whole family is going and I am part of the family! I am definitely looking forward to 1) my first outing with the family 2) the food 3) seeing another town in Syria.

--

Other moments of note with the fam this week:

- The father asking me if I believed in Jesus. He was very concerned with my response and told me it is important that young women like myself have high morals and that he hopes I am very happy in life with a good man and many babies. The conversation lightened a bit when he told me another one of his proverbs, which is something like “At 20 a woman is the most beautiful to look at, at 30 is the best time for her to have babies, at 40 and 50 something something and then at 60, the knife!”

- Debate with the family about whether the Qu’ran was originally written without the dots above and below letters that distinguish one from another (for instance the same shape with one dot above is an “n”, with two dots it is a “t,” with three it is the sound “th”). This led to the argument that Muslims don’t know the true meaning of the Qu’ran because someone filled in the dots and who knows if its actually correct. I asked if there was a form of Arabic that existed before the Qu’ran without dots, they responded, yes, I think so. So maybe they understood how to read it without dots, even though we cannot today, and it was translated into text with dots when that style developed?

- Home alone with Farah, the youngest son (13), whom I haven’t spoken to that much since he doesn’t speak English well and I don’t volunteer to speak Arabic. We were doing homework in the TV room and I turned on the news to practice listening. There was a news story from Iraq about 9 children who were kidnapped and held for ransom and there was an interview with one of the parents whose child was returned and Farah and I were both at a loss to understand the Iraqi dialect. It made me feel a little better about myself. Then I changed the channel to the Fox Movie Channel which was playing The Punisher (with Arabic subtitles) and Farah warned me that it wouldn’t be good for me (he meant because it was unnecessarily graphic in its depiction of violence) and so we bonded over his teenager-delight in the movie and my inability to watch someone get tortured by having his lip rings being pulled out.