LEVANTINE

The large woman standing in front of the classroom announced before the slowly filling classroom, "Hello... and good morning, I will be your teacher my name is Matilda... Matilda Sayegh... for Levantine Arabiye. We will study the language and the culture... for Introductory FLA... Foreign Language Arabic 101 and intermediate FLA 102. You will need immersion for the local accent and local custom on your own time later. Let us begin."

Day one brought home the ideal set before me then. I'd studied to be a licensed realtor and now had the option for doing an associate position on a university professor's sabbatical for an upcoming two months... with college credit for attending. My purpose there would be as a consultant alongside the Peace Corps group attending at Tunisia for dual Agriculture and water projects. All applications in and medical requirements on schedule to be completed by the given date, I was studying these two courses in Arabic... Levantine Arabic as the most prevalent version of the language in all Arabic-speaking regions. Mrs. Sayegh was from the Levant as a child some many years ago and held all reverie for what that region of the world offered throughout all history. Because of her own appreciation for the language, the people, and culture, those registered for her courses were overtly excited for what was coming. Prior to the onset of the first class, I had visited the modern languages building at a nearby campus to sign up as an ESL tutor and received notice from a couple eager to practice their learned English... in exchange for my own minor immersion in Arabic; a feat I was certain to encounter as we struggled to understand each other... them in their U of M community studies and me in my "dive deep" optimism from Sayegh's classes and real estate clients met over the past two years. The extra bonus to making the trip was in fulfilling one of two lifelong dreams... seeing Carthagay... Carthage was a history subject raped by an elementary school teacher. She began the subject, then dropped it suddenly and without explanation after a question arose from a fourth-grade mind about "why the Trojan horse was in the same year as Hannibal and Napoleon," in the social studies homework assignment. That teacher had thrown the books out of class and started a new subject and series of textbooks. She hated the subject and we were left hanging. Needless to say, the region of the world that handled all of history became and remains a subject of interest.

The course went smoothly as did the optioned ESL and Arabic language exchange. Preselected words and phrases intertwined as conversations and spontaneous individual student add-ins of spoken concerns in the Arabic language told the gist of learning the language in a two-semester setting. I learned enough to conduct a brief conversation of questions about foods, locations... directions, identifiers of family relations, various actions... counting, and alphabet with the two-semester crash course that included customs and food tasting shared among class members. Several dishes were homemade including my own hummus and khubz. (I didn't know how to make hummus or khubz!)

The instructor was a mothering type woman who treated most students, those who would allow it... like the children she never had. She was Julia Child without the turkey in a pan, working from a designated office and classroom at the university instead of a stunt kitchen at a television studio. She had come over as a teen from Lebanon in the 50s, after the end of World War II when times were calmer. United Nations Organization was being formed and peace was the mandate for all nations. She had come over with male family members and was held to restricted relationships for family and national causes. In her idle time, she studied college courses, became an educator with a degree in physical education; and taught Levantine Arabic or acted as translator and interpreter for meetings when called to do so. I became fairly good acquaintance of the instructor, sitting at times for tea and chit chat about customs in varied Arabic lands... Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi and Dubai. She knew persons from them all. The United Nations had been her focal point in her younger years and she held on to relationships formed through it.

When the Kuwait War began in 1990 the language classes were completed and the option to accompany the instructor on sabbatical was retracted. In the summer I had purchased a computer from Kamal and Mohamad, engineering students at the University of Michigan, and was deep into cartography mapping underground water sources for a relocated population in Yemen. Water resources would have to be drilled deep well, but I situated the latitude and longitude with depth to measure groundwater. There was a crew being researched to set a pump site. I had begun a new... somewhat volunteer job at a local diner prepping Lebanese dishes at a small diner near campus. The job ended during the onset of mobs that poured through town breaking windows, puncturing tires, and drive-by shootings in the rage at having to participate in the war overseas. Kuwait held enough interest from the United States military to have members of the National Guard mandated to begin mobilization procedures as early as September. Between September and the end of December mention of a commercial airliner...an airbus... being shot down by accident, brought news that my husband had been killed in the incident along with over 200 other passengers. I became part of the rush to find the actual information and details on the news by CNN and new briefs by the American President and his staff. In December, while running a court evidence errand for my employer, a drunk driver, an employee working a distance job for his employer... Planters-Lifesavers Corporation of Ohio... rear-ended my car as I sat in a line of traffic waiting for the light to change so that other cars could progress through the light and I could turn into our company parking lot. The incident caused my car to propel forward into the vehicle of a woman in town from Grayling Air Force base on a shopping trip in Ann Arbor. My car radiator and grill were totaled and the car was undrivable. Something was wrong with the transmission. I sustained a whiplash from the force of impact that nearly drove my face into the windshield. The steering wheel and the car ahead of me stopped motion. The engineering office section supervisor granted three weeks time off from work for the whiplash... cervical strain. Despite car insurance through FARMERS INSURANCE, the car was repaired out of pocket and returned a few weeks after I returned to work and to military training at Selfridge Air National Guard Base where preparations for mobilization to war in Kuwait and Desert Storm was underway. Files of enlistees... mine among them, were being pulled and rostered, immunizations were being issued in first and second level injections for Smallpox, Yellow fever, Measles... and according to one med-tech, Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The immunizations caused me to hemorrhage large clumps of blood and tissue. The bleeding lasted well into three weeks. My daughter was raped while staying with her father in Chicago, and gave birth to the resultant child under the safeguard of my health coverage, after having been chased back and forth across the distance of highways between my college campus and her father's residence in Chicago. A few months later, my son... her brother graduated from high school and left for college. I was set for graduation with a double degree. Instead, I blacked out from blunt force head trauma and was raped and gaffed on campus within weeks of graduation.

That's a bit of what confused the campus or what was confusing about the NORMAL CAMPUS as some called it. While I enrolled to finish college and to regain a sense of normal flow in life, it failed to evolve while I was there. I might still tell some of anyone to, "Go to college... it'll be good for you."

There was some confusion much later. An old co-worker and her friend came to my apartment for coffee and brunch at Gandydancer's Restaurant in town and the word got out that I had married a Lesbian. They were never seeing who it was but for sure I married a lesbian. I do remember telling whoever it was that, "The word is Lebanese... not lesbian."