Faking It

So I was in West Darfur this weekend visiting projects and people, eating lots of sand, and collecting stories for this blog. I mentioned before, but for foreigners to be allowed to travel outside of Khartoum, we need special government permission. For the Darfur states, you need permission to travel to the state and then permission to travel around the state. You also need police escorts to travel outside of the main town or you risk being abducted by various peoples with grudges against various other peoples who like to use foreigners as bargaining tools and/or sources of income. As soon as I arrived in Geneina, I dumped off my stuff at the guest house and headed over to the local government office to register my permits and arrange for the police escort, and that's where this story starts...

Geneina--it's a nice little dusty desert down

Note: Words in italics were spoken in Arabic.

In my thobe, ready to Darfur

Majid: When we go inside to talk to the governmental officials, don’t speak any Arabic. Just let them talk to me. If they think you speak Arabic, they will ask lots of questions.

Me: OK. I will only speak English….starting now.

So we went into the tin-walled office/people oven, and sat down in chairs that looked fancy, but had clearly defined butt-imprints from where many people before us had sat and waited for hours until those chairs would never be able to forget them. I will also never be able to forget the chair that I sank into…

Walking in was pretty awkward for me because in Arab culture there are a plethora of greetings that one must give upon entrance, each of which has a specific answer. Allow me to give you some examples that, if you don’t speak Arabic, will mean absolutely nothing to you. But it will be cathartic for me.

Person 1: Salam 3alaykum

Person 2: 3alaykum salam

Person 1: Allah ya5tik al-3afiya

Person 2: Allah ya3fik.

Person 1: Alhamdulilah 3asalama

Person 2: Allah yasalmak

Person 1: Keyf halak?

Clay pots for storing water--they keep it nice and cool

Person 2: Tamam wallah… And then at this point everyone is talking all over each other and it doesn’t matter what you say, but it should probably be a bunch of questions as to the other person’s health and the well-being of his family. You should also be slapping his right shoulder with your left hand while gripping his right hand with your right hand and telling him how great you and your family are—the Sudanese way is to say you are all 100% great (miya-miya).

I wasn’t sure if someone who doesn’t speak Arabic would know those things, so I just decided to completely feign ignorance of the whole ritual. I know that plenty of Arabic-less foreigners at least know “salam 3alaykum,” but if I said that with correct pronunciation, would it give me away? But then it feels bad mispronouncing something when I’m not, say, pretending to be an Australian speaking Indonesian or something like that … And you know how sometimes all you say is two words and then people go off about how well you speak their language—even if all you knew was those two words? I’d just been told by the lady checking me into my WFP flight that morning that my Arabic was really good and she was shocked because none of the Americans she knows who speak any Arabic can pronounce things correctly—which is actually pretty unfair, as I know plenty of Americans who speak excellent Arabic. I could name names, but I don’t want to embarrass them…(one of them, we'll call her "Emily" probably just got advanced-mid on her most recent Arabic test). Of course, the ones who don’t speak it well are often more memorable. I still remember a little blonde southern belle in my Arabic class at the University of Memphis who learned how to say “I eat” in Arabic, and excitedly exclaimed to the rest of the class, “Ya’ll! We’re speakin’ Ay-Rab-Ik!” She was also the one who informed us that her boyfriend, Musa Habibi, should not cause us any undue concern. “Ya’ll, he’s Palestinian, but ya’ll, he’s not a terrorist. I know. I asked him. I said, ‘Musa Habibi, are you a terrorist?’ and he said, ‘No.’” So there was that… and I guess if she’d been my only experience with Americans speaking Arabic, then I can understand the flight attendant’s surprise. I, personally, have no excuse for not speaking Arabic, having lived in 6 Arabic-speaking nations, though I have never had a non-terrorist Palestinian boyfriend either and I feel like that should be an advantage too…

Enjoying the view with Tahany

Pretending not to speak a language that you do speak fairly well, is not as easy as it seems. First, I had to really concentrate and not answer questions about myself that I understood, especially ones where I felt the need to defend myself (i.e. Why didn’t you get your permission renewed? Answer I wanted to give: we did, look at the form, moron!—probably a good thing I wasn’t talking…). The other thing goes back to the Arabic greeting question-and-answer issue, and not giving the answer to the questions feels like singing a song, but leaving out the last note. To relieve my feelings, I spent the rest of our wait-time secretly texting a bunch of my friends in Arabic, carefully hiding my phone from others sitting nearby.

We ended up sitting around for about an hour or so because the guy we needed to talk to wasn’t there. If we left for lunch, there was no guarantee he’d be there when we got back, and the next day was the weekend, and we’d miss them completely if we didn’t finalize our plans that day. When the guy finally got there, he was really polite and friendly and the first thing he asked me was, “Do you speak any Arabic?”

Donkey carrying water-system 1

I said, “Small.” I don’t even think I really perjured myself, because it is a grammatically incorrect not-really-an-answer to his question. It’s like if someone asked you if you like to eat chicken and you said, “Bob.” It’s not lying – it’s just nonsense.

As we walked out the door, I did decide to say, “Shukran.” I thought it would be something that my character (I was playing the part of ‘random foreign girl working for INGO in Sudan’) would actually know. But Majid gave me a look…so maybe I was wrong…

Donkey carrying water-system 2

Anyway, as soon as we walked out the gate, Majid turned to me in great relief (English isn’t his favorite), and started chattering back at me in Arabic about the whole ordeal and about what we were going to eat for lunch when we got back to the office. I was also relieved as I grabbed on to the handle of the truck to heave myself into the cab (all these NGO cars are so dang tall with their four-wheel drive tires). I was thinking that this no-Arabic thing could come back to bite us in our chair-imprinting butts. I mean, what if the nice man in charge asks some other IAS person about me and they talk about how I speak Arabic (it’s my one defining feature)? But then I found out from Majid that another guy from the same office would be joining us on our trips out of town, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the cat in the bag at that point. I was planning to try to convince the guy that I learned Arabic quickly on Friday during prayer time (a miracle!), but then Majid said it wouldn’t really matter. The main reason he didn’t want me to speak Arabic at the government office was because he thought it would mean that we would get stuck there longer because everyone would want to talk to me. Since we were there for an hour and a half anyway, I don’t know that it would have made much difference, but I do sometimes like to show off, and I usually try to make a point of being extra-charming to security officers because you never know when that will come in handy…and that can be time-consuming.  

The important thing is that we made it out alive, with a police escort lined  up for our next two trips, and no slip-ups from me, the random foreign girl working for an INGO in Sudan who never broke character (until the very end when I said "shukran").

 This may be my favorite awkward photo--the man moved in while I was still talking to the lady.
Does this count as a photo bomb? Technically, I think I was the one not paying attention to the camera man.

Sign at the Khawaja Store: For breakfast, I'd like some sausaga and egges,
and for lunch - a purger and a bottle of carponated water, please.