Feb. 13, 2011
Ahmed is from Iraq. He came to Illinois last August to study computer engineering, took an English test the night he arrived, did poorly and was placed into my advanced ESL class. His English should have been good enough to go straight to grad school, but jet lag had clouded his mind. He could have been upset, like some other students, about having to study English before starting the university, he might have viewed it as a waste of time but instead he tells me, “Well, it will be a good way to get accustomed to the United States and the school.” Like that attitude!
Ahmed is fresh off the plane, so to speak. He has never been outside of Iraq. He is brilliant, self-confident, aware of his intellect, cocky. He’s a mama’s boy who’s been told his whole life he’s exceptional. Mama was right. He is also the hardest worker I’ve ever met. He has earned his cockiness. Ahmed tells me he has never actually spoken English before. He’s been studying it for years, but as a formal, abstract subject so he can read technical books, not as something to actually use to communicate. I don’t know how a mouth molding sounds for the first time can do it so well. Ahmed is talented. He’s also thrilled, he’s alive and energized: all he wants to do is speak, speak, speak, pour out everything that has been kept inside him. He smiles as he speaks; he emanates life. Yet he is also a sponge, thrilled to be on this adventure, literally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to learn. He is ready to embrace and conquer.
Ahmed is from Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. His native tongue is Turkish. He also speaks Arabic, a bit of Kurdish, and of course English. Ahmed has seen war and destruction, even within his own family. He prefers not to dwell on it, and quickly erases the cloud that comes over his face as he changes the subject. Ahmed is more than a survivor; he flourishes, he thrives.
Ahmed comes to class every day wearing t-shirts with the university logo, jeans and sneakers. He is in his American university student disguise. Many of my Middle Eastern students adopt this disguise. I believe he has two of these t-shirts. I wonder what he wears at home in Iraq. I know it’s not this getup; there, he tells me, students must dress formally to show respect for their professors. When fall arrives, he rotates two sweaters, these clearly from Iraq, judging from the style, until he delightedly reveals to me that he has discovered Kohl’s, and then his repertoire widens.
The other students – mainly Saudis, but also some Chinese and a Libyan – admire Ahmed. He should get paid as my assistant teacher. He is so diligent, so intelligent; they trust his expertise. Perhaps more than mine. After all, it’s a content-based English class and the topic is… astronomy. As a hard-core liberal arts person, this is hard for me. It’s not about the moon and seasons, constellations and orbits; I can handle that. It’s about cosmology, chemical elements, physics equations: a foreign language for me, one I’ve happily, avidly avoided. I flounder. Ahmed doesn’t. He’s fascinated. He’s intrigued. I skip the formulas; he explains them. I simplify Newton’s three laws; he relishes explaining them in all their detail.
Cosmology: part-science, part-philosophy, part-religion. Where do we come from? How did it all come about? Is the universe finite or infinite? Does it have boundaries; if not, or if so, where does God live? If the universe is everything and God is part of it, who or what created God? Is there a God? Is our vast universe just a tiny molecule inside a larger universe, which in turn is a tiny molecule inside another vaster universe? Where does it all start and end? Is it forever oscillating, expanding and contracting ad infinitum, or was it created one day just to come to an end at some point in the future? And then… nothingness, for eternity. Are we really, literally stardust, just bits of cosmic chemical elements that happened to float and coalesce here and now, or are we unique creatures breathed into being through divine creation?
Astronomy challenges our very existence, our very conception of ourselves and our place in the world, and it certainly challenges our faith, or reinforces it, depending on how you look at it. None of my Muslim students have studied this before. Astronomy doesn’t exist as a discipline in their countries, they tell me. They never knew there was a science of the universe. One of my Saudi students says that his country has no space program because returned astronauts go mad – space makes humans crazy.
How do I work with that?
But Ahmed gets it. His mind is expansive. He’s fascinated. He lifts his eyes heavenward. He goes stargazing. He lowers his eyes earthward. He digs for articles, information. His mind stretches with the thought of the ever-expanding and contracting universe. He is alive. He tells me he is going to change his degree to satellite communications or, in honor of the movie Contact which we watch in class – in which Jodie Foster establishes contact with alien beings – perhaps he wants to work on harnessing communications to establish contact with other galaxies, explore worm holes, discover time warps. His paradigms have shifted; his outlook is larger; his neurons are firing. SETI is his future.
The next term I am fortunate enough to have Ahmed in class again. This class is more up my alley: cross-cultural communication, my mission in life, my gospel, my calling. This model brought happiness and understanding to my life, helped me make sense of the Spaniards as I lived among them for 17 years. It made me grasp different vantage points, different values, different senses of good and bad, right and wrong. It helped me understand, not react viscerally, when something didn’t go as I expected it to.
I work my students through dimensions of cultural difference, continua of cultural variation, the ways we are different. Light bulbs go on, as they always do. Motley assortments of experiences shuffle into place and make sense. Others aren’t crazy; they just live by different rules. Our culture isn’t right; it’s just one way out of many, many valid ways humans have tried to resolve the problems life throws at them.
Ahmed is invited to Washington to speak to representatives of Iraqi universities, to talk to them about studying in the United States. He is deeply honored by the invitation. The other students are jealous, admiring, awestruck. Me, too! He comes back a week later. He tells me, “I told them all about individual versus collective cultures; I told them all about plagiarism and ownership of knowledge here. I told them how achievement counts here more than who you know. I told them about the egalitarianism here compared to the hierarchy in my culture, about how you want us to call you Mary. They were very impressed. They asked me to talk again next meeting because I know so much.”
He is proud. I am moved. Ahmed has taken all of this knowledge and made it his own. Instead of random bits of confounding experience, he has a coherent model for understanding who he is and who we are; why he acts as he does and why we do. He has grown from it, shared it and now has helped others grow from it, just as I grew from it, shared it and helped him grow from it. The endless chain of understanding. He is adding on more links of wisdom and understanding. He is embracing his new home and culture, making sense of it, letting it fill him and change him. Now Ahmed wants to be a cross-cultural trainer when he goes back to Iraq. I couldn’t imagine a better one.
Ahmed has left his country for the first time, a war-torn country thanks to us. He tells me that he was afraid Americans wouldn’t like or trust him since he’s Iraqi, but he has found nothing but openness and warmth. How shameful – shouldn’t we be the ones worried that he won’t like or trust us? We have destroyed his country on false pretexts. And yet, he embraces us, honored to be accepted by us, eager to learn from us. And now Ahmed’s world has changed, expanded. From computer engineering he wants to contact new galaxies, he wants to spread the word about cultural harmony around his land. Ahmed’s eyes have opened, and he has opened my eyes to the beauty of an open mind, an absorbent mind, one that comes into a new world with humility and the capacity to be filled, expanded, stretched, connected, and one with a desire to share that treasure.
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