east west

after the curtain

I never know what's waiting for me when I tutor my Iraqi family. Recently, it seems as if I've been teaching any of the random dozen-or-so people flowing in and out of the tiny apartment. It's constantly a party in there: the tea never stops flowing, and as the night progresses, the conversations get louder and louder to the point that I forget that I'm anywhere close to America.

Sometimes I teach the sixty year old mother, dressed in black from head to toe. Another week, it will be the pop-culture-obsessed eighteen year old daughter. Once it was a ten year old boy with a cowlick and toothy grin. Maybe it will be the 33 year old son, who knows very little English, yet he aspires to get his MBA (And then - he tells me - he'll get a job in Saudi Arabia. He'll hire me, and we'll both makes lots and lots of oil money. I'll like Saudi Arabia, he says. The hijab isn't that bad.) I stopped developing lesson plans months ago.

Last night I was asked to help a young girl I'd seen around before - she was always very quiet, and would slip in and out of the apartment largely unnoticed. I sat down with her at the kitchen table and tried to get a gauge on her language. Due to her shyness - I incorrectly gathered that her knowledge was fairly minimal. We were working through prepositions ("The book is on the table. The book is under the table. The book is above the table.") when she stopped me and said, quite perfectly: "I want to ask you a question: Are you married?"

"Yes, I am," I answered, taken aback.

"Do you love him?"

"Yes, I love him - he's my husband!"

She was quiet. I asked her if she had a boyfriend - and she looked at me and whispered, "I'm married. I have a husband. He is in Iraq, and my mother does not like him and does not know that we are married. I cannot even say his name in my house. He is moving here in one month. So my question is: How do I leave my family and live with him?"

Geez. I thought I was just going to be talking about the present simple tense tonight, not advising on cultural matters about which I know absolutely nothing. To act incorrectly on this could get me into a lot of trouble with the whole little community they've so carefully created.

I looked her in the eyes and tried to say, "If you live with him, you may lose all of these people in the room - it would just be you and him. You may be lonely. You are already in a difficult situation, in that you live in a new country where you barely grasp the language and don't know the culture. You don't have a job, you don't have your own apartment, your husband doesn't know the language, and what if he's not the person you remember him to be? Your family has already lost so much - do they need to lose you now as well?" Except it came out as, "I don't know".

Her mother then walked into the apartment, and the girl quieted me with her eyes. The conversation was over.

posted by jessica @ 2:32 PM