Will Stone - TP 6

 

A week had past since my last session with Shaykhah. I got in contact with her and we agreed to meet in the same room we had been meeting in. as soon as I walked in she informed me that her husband would be coming to pick her up in a half hour or so. We proceeded ahead with our reading exercise with the newspaper. This time, I asked her to read out loud so that I could hear her pronunciation better. We started with shorter articles detailing world events, rather than articles focusing on local politics like our last session. The first article she read through detailed an insurgency in Syria. She picked out words like ‘insurgency’ and ‘uprising,’ words that pertained primarily to military combat. I wasn’t sure how she would react to articles detailing violence in the Middle East. I still did not know as much about her life in her native country and whether or not reading articles that detailed the violence would offend or upset her in any way. However, she didn’t really register an emotional reaction and handled the articles as she had handled the previous readings. If anything, some of the words she questioned caught me of guard. I was still getting used to defining and explaining words which I knew the definition, but had not had to explain it in relatable terms such was my experience in explaining what a ‘grenade’ was. I felt uncomfortable having to explain how it would be used, citing old war films that she had not seen as examples. There was quite a bit of exaggerated gesturing in my definition, but once I explained it as a bomb that you throw at an enemy, she seemed to grasp it. I got the impression that some of the words were familiar conceptually to her, but given that she had not encountered the word in English it was not in her active vocabulary. She had about five or six words in her vocabulary log before she told me abruptly that her husband was waiting and that she had to go. We scheduled to meet later that week and she left. In all of our social interaction together, Shaykhah always seems to abruptly stop our sessions. She is very polite about it, I just feel like the way we conclude is sudden and can’t help but wonder if there is a cultural disconnect or something that I am not picking up on in terms of greeting and parting.