Begin Transmission....
Friday, September 09, 2005
Hello Everyone,
Eifo Darren? Hee-nay ah-nee. (phoentic spelling for "Where's Darren? Here I am.")
It has been nearly a week since I wrote anything down. I can explain with three words and a hyphen: Hebrew-language school.
Wow! What a week. Sunday through Thursday at the ulpan. I have felt many emotions over the past week, including excitement, hopelessness and the feelings associated with being overwhelmed. Mostly what it is is how lost I am feeling in class. Nearly all the students are Jewish and growing up had much exposure to the Hebrew language in their homes and schools. I feel close to the bottom of the pile and for those of you who know my school habits, it is very difficult for me to feel at the bottom of the class. I am having a difficult time with the speed of speech and my lack of vocabulary. I realise that I have access to a dictionary and that the science of grammar and verb conjugation is more important than learning words, at this point; but when the teacher asks the class questions, I have discovered that most of the students know the words because of their backgrounds, where I am radiply looking through my vocab sheets, trying to figure out she's saying. Usually, before I find the word, she is on to something else and my feelings of confusion and being lost are just compounded.
Yesterday, however, I tried a new strategy. Instead of trying to keep up with the words and understand what she and others were saying, I just concentrated on listening to the conjugations of the verbs and adjectives, etc., listening for how they change according to masculine, feminine, singular or plural, and different forms thereof. I found that even if I didn't know what was being said, much of the time, I was able to follow how it was being said.
I am sure, however, that as the weeks progress, I will feel more confident with the language and be able to follow the speed of speech and the finer points of suffixes and prefixes on words. I have found that to be the most confusing, thus far: thinking that I hear some kind of new word and futilely looking through my vocab sheets for this mystery word, when really it is a prefix on a word I already know.
I have also been busy working at Zochrot, putting in close to thirty hours this week. I am not working so much because I am trying to be a hero or to impress anyone. Rather, there is just much that can be done and I wanted to finish the video clip of our tour and sign-posting to Akka this week. I did get it finished, which is good because it was a mess. It won't be posted on the site until next week and also by next week I hope to have a streaming option on our website. Needless to say, there is much to keep me busy and I have only found time to write to you today, Friday is my Saturday.
My Hebrew class runs from Sun through Thurs, 8am to 1pm. There close to forty students in my class and perhaps several hundred students in the school, in various levels. I am in the kindergarten class and it certainly is humbling to be one of the clueless students of the kindergarten. Most of the students in my class are Jewish (the others have Jewish girlfriends or boyfriends they live with) and there is a pile of students who are new immigrants in the class - the rest of us call ourselves tourists. Other than the occassional explanation of a word in English, the teacher teaches exclusively in Hebrew. I suppose it is only fair, since there are some french folks and a half-dozen Russians who cannot understand English. There are folks from South America, North America and Europe in my class. A real diverse bunch. As tempted as I am to have a pity party and feel discouraged, I know that compared to what little Hebrew I knew last week, after one week of classes I know much, much more. And after five full months, I am sure that I will be doing okay. I don't know if I will be fluent after this course is over; but I am hoping that I will be able to understand and communicate when I need to.
I had myself an epiphany this week regarding the quality of driving in Tel Aviv, which I will get to in a moment. I have been to many countries in the world and seen much poor driving. But by far, the worst driving I have ever witnessed is here in Tel Aviv. It blows my mind how little thought is given to safety, basic courtesy or defensive driving. And the constant, aggressive horn blowing drives me nuts. I have heard some internationals tell me that honking your horn is not an offensive thing to do; it is just run of the mill driving practice. Yeah, well, I have heard Tel Avivers make fun of Palestinian drivers because they use the horn as a "hello, here I am" signal (by Palestinians, I mean WestBank residents, primarily, since that was the conversation), whereas in Tel Aviv it is a weapon of war used to assault people. I have seen hundreds of incidents where the horn is used to punish someone or to express the absolute impatience of the drivers here. Before the lights go green, here, there is a flash of the red and yellow together to let people know the green is coming. As SOON as that yellow lights flashes on, drivers are laying on their horns or honking repeatedly. If you look at their faces, which I do, they are angry and stressed out and have zero patience for any kind of politeness.
It is very rare that people do shoulder checks, which causes me to have to squeeze my brakes a lot, sometimes skidding into car's bumpers or being pushed into oncoming traffic. Cars don't bother to look for bicycles and last week I was pushed into an oncoming bus. I got out of the way just in time, but my left arm still wiped down the side of the bus as it passed me while the car to my right hemmed me in. I can't believe I wasn't hurt or that I didn't fall off my bike. I am learning that in order for me to stay safe, I have to ride more offensively and quickly. I can't just mosey down the street because I'll get overrun by the vehicles on the road. If I pedal really hard and ride fast, then I am quicker than the cars and can choose my line with less interruption. And I cannot just ride on the sidewalk, because the lack of ecological sensitivity means that the sidewalks are riddled with bits of broken glass. I have been through two innertubes since I got my bike and I have been told by several people that riding on the sidewalk will only result in popped tires.
What really gets me, though, is the lack of shoulder checking, especially from taxi drivers. When I am speeding along I am not getting pushed around by the cars in the way I would if I were taking my time; but the risk is that cars will swerve erradically without looking over their shoulders. Many times I have nearly rammed full speed into cars or have slammed on my brakes to avoid being pushed into another car. And it was making me more and more angry.
After a week of fighting my way across the city to school during morning traffic, then fighting my away across town to the office during noon-hour traffic, I was getting really grumpy. I would show up at school and the girl beside me asked two days in a row, "what's wrong, you look really stressed out?" I found myself yelling at cars but definitely avoiding doing things I would feel comfortable doing in Vancouver, such as kicking cars or giving them communicative hand signals. Well, Wednesday afternoon, it came crashing down upon me that I cannot expect the drivers in Tel Aviv to ever match my standards of proper driving, in fact, it is downright ethnocentric to get upset about it.
So, I realized, I need to just change my anger and annoyance into laughter and light-heartedness; that was my epiphany. I found that when I rode to school on Thursday morning, I had a laugh when I was rudely cut off; and when I was riding to work that afternoon, I again laughed when a man approached from behind me honking his horn repeatedly as we were approaching a RED light. There was no where for him to go but he just wanted to speed up to the red light. He didn't even catch up to me, either, he just didn't want a bicycle on his road, I guess.
My epiphany may seem minor to you, not worthy of being called and epiphany; but in light of how much I ride my bike and how much the standard of driving could stress me out or cause me to be upset, I think that a flash of insight changing my whole attitude towards drivers does me good to not be sucked into the same road rage that so infects the drivers here. I also want to add my own speculation that because Israelis are constantly living in a paranoid state that they might be blown up at any moment, this affects many areas of their lives, such as basic courteousness and patience towards strangers. I suspect that people keep their kindness reserved for who they know and forget the idea for those who they don't. I could be dead wrong; but those are the observations I have made as an outsider looking in.
This week I spent some time with Eitan Reich one evening, talking over some things about work and giving me a break from Hebrew study. He and his wife are expecting a baby in November and he was telling me that he is scared to death. His wife's cousin and her husband were on a bus that was blown up by a suicide bomber some time ago and they lost their one-year-old child. They both lived, emigrated to the United States, and had another baby. Eitan, in the face of the tensions here, is very nervous about raising a child in such an environment and wonders if he should get out, like his wife's aunt keeps telling them. I must confess I do not know what it is like to live with this kind of looming fear. I cannot even intepret it as I'm living here. It isn't a part of my psyche. Sure, I'm paranoid and cowardly; but I do not live with a constant fear of being killed or maimed in a terror attack. It just has never been a part of my life.
As a result of being overwhelmed at school this week and feeling the burden of living in a stressed-out and celebratedly rude city, a toll has been taken on my morale. The new, glossy, exciting feeling I have had is gone and I have been feeling really homesick. I think that must be perfectly natural, so I am not panicking like I would if I didn't expect to feel this way. I just really miss family, friends, church, Christian fellowship. I miss understanding my surrounding culture and being able to read things and follow along. I am tired of feeling like such an outsider all the time; but this is normal, I keep telling myself; it will pass. I also think that these feelings of wanting to disappear from here and reappear in Vancouver are also a result of the steep learning curve I am experiencing right now. I tend to be a little bit of a baby and a wuss, so I am not letting my emotions determine my actions - I just wish I could laugh more (which I probably still do, alot, since the people in my class all laugh whenever I laugh and the teacher stops teaching and turns and smiles and says something about how she loves my laugh).
I am not pathetically depressed; please don't interpret things that way. I am just missing my home communities of fellowship, that's all.
Alright, that's enough for today, eh? Besides, I have got to study my Hebrew materials and spend some significant time with the alphabet, both the formally written version (newspapers, menus, signs, etc) and the informally written version (personal writing, unpublished writings, etc.) before I go to my dinner party tonight. I am joining Norma and her Maxist commune for dinner tonight for a potluck and have prepared a terrific veggie stew. "Dinner" is at 9pm; I have three hours to work on Hebrew before leaving.
Have a Lovely Day!
Burro D Block OUT
ps. for ALI G fans (real name, Sacha Baron Cohen) - I heard at school this week he is Jewish, Cohen proves it, and I learned that "Yekh Shamesh" means "longlive sunshine." Or, he could be taking off from "yesh shemesh," which means "it is sunny." And when he says, "Buyakasha," he is taking off from "Bevakasha," which means "please" and "you're welcome."
End Transmission....
No comments:
Post a Comment