This month I had a lot of encounters with local children. Here are some interesting things that happened while being around kids this month:
I met an eleven year old girl at the community center who spoke perfect English because she went to an English immersion school. We talked about what we hope will happen in our futures, and started talking about the families we want someday. She told me she wants to adopt children someday. I said that was a good idea, and maybe I would do that too. She then responded, “Oh, you’ll definitely go to heaven then. If anyone gives a home to a homeless child, they automatically go to heaven.” This was both an endearing and unsettling statement.
This same girl came back to the community center another evening, and brought her six year old sister with her. The eleven year old wanted nothing to do with the six year old, and kept trying to get her to leave her alone and go away (typical). After the eleven year old had been sufficiently mean to her younger sister, the eleven year old left for a few minutes to grab some snacks, leaving her six year old sister with me. As soon as her older sister walked out the door, the six year old came up to me with that both sad and angry look on her face that younger sisters get when they get picked on, and gave me a hug out of the blue.
One of my language tutors works at a school and teaches high schoolers. I went to his school this week to sit in on one of his classes on Arabic grammar (I understood about 10% of what was going on). When I arrived outside the classroom door, there were students waiting in the hallway. The students saw me, and immediately shouted into the classroom, “Hey! Teacher! A white foreign girl just came!”. It was pretty funny, honestly.
I was sitting on the metro one morning playing Subway Surfers on my phone (yeah, I’m cool like that), and a little six year old girl came and sat next to me. She started watching me play, and then told me that her friend had that game, too. She then asked me if I had any other games, and I showed her that I just had that and Solitaire. She scoffed at me disapprovingly, and said, “You really should get more games on your phone.” Then she got up and left with her mom.
One of my favorite things to do on the metro is to make weird faces and raise my eyebrows repeatedly at little children when their parents aren’t looking. Usually the kids here don’t respond to me when I do that, or they just continue to stare at me blankly (where are you from and why are you so pale?). But a few weeks ago, I raised my eyebrows repeatedly at a little five year old boy holding his veiled mother’s hand, and he raised them back at me! It was the coolest thing ever.