The ridiculous
amount of missed calls and multiple failures in communication leading up to my
first meeting with Khalifa was honestly kind of a disaster. At first I could
not get a hold of him via email, and then I missed his call during the week of
a Cell Biology and Organic Chemistry Test. Following that, it was probably
another two weeks before I lost an unintentional game of phone tag and we
finally met on the first floor of the BLUU. I had no idea what to expect. All I
knew was that I really wanted to call the kid ‘Wiz’, like the rapper, but I
doubted he would understand the pop culture reference and decided against it.
I
could tell from the concise emails and my experiences trying to decode his text
messages that communicating with Khalifa was not going to be a simple task. He
walked up to me while I was sitting in a chair in the BLUU and seemed amiable
enough. We greeted each other and did the awkward guy handshake where you don’t
really know whether to do a man-shake or try something cooler, so you end up
with this hybrid handshake that you both are forced to just play cool and segue
into conversation. Khalifa is from
a large town in Saudi Arabia. I know I should probably have remembered which
city, but he spent at least twenty minutes of our first meeting teaching me how
to count and say simple phrases in Arabic, and all of the phonetics have
jumbled together in my head. Regardless, we started off with all the basics:
“Where are you from?”, “What are you studying?”, et cetera. I found out that
Khalifa is studying abroad and actually has a ton of family spread out all
throughout the states. He is at TCU with his cousin and is here to improve his
English. He wants to be an engineer, but he also explicitly exhibited his
hatred of math. I asked him about this contradiction and he just started
laughing. I’m not sure what that meant or if he truly understood what I was
asking, but it was funny and we shared a great laugh.
I
have always heard that English is a miserable language to learn as a second
language, so I asked Khalifa about it. He conveyed that for the most part the
grammar isn’t too bad, except for the idiom. Khalifa hates idioms with a
passion and I can see why. If you think about them concretely, they make
absolutely no sense and sound ridiculous. I remember trying to learn idioms in
Spanish during high school and hating every second of it. I can only imagine
what Khalifa must be dealing with.
As
I mentioned earlier, Khalifa seemed to really enjoy teaching me words in
Arabic, or at least listening to me butcher simple phrases. Either way, I found
it incredibly difficult to replicate certain sounds he would make, and,
whenever he would congratulate me on saying something correctly, I knew there
was an extremely real chance that I would not be able to replicate that phrase
if my life depended on it. Counting was easier, but still a ton harder than I
expected. I had never really
thought how difficult it must be for people who do not speak the native language
to live in a foreign country for an extended period of time until that moment.
Khalifa could speak fairly well, but at the same time it was obvious that at
certain points he had no idea what I was saying and was just mirroring my
emotions. It was an interesting example of communication. We both were looking
for the easiest set of words or phrases to convey what we were trying to say so
that the other would understand. It was a unique and enlightening experience. Despite
our increasingly permeable communication barrier, I had a great first meeting
with Khalifa and looked forward to meeting with him again.
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