Rupper pand

Right now, it is final exam time at the School of Hope, so I have been doing a lot of work to prepare exams. It is somewhat stressful work since the exams are so important and carry a lot of weight in the students' grades. Plus EVERYONE at the school is stressed out during exam period.

Today, I was alone in the office for a while, working on preparing next Monday's exams. A younger student, probably second grade, who I haven't met before came in and asked me for something in Arabic. Over the course of the year between working in a school every day and taking Arabic lessons, I have gotten pretty good at the standard school words in Arabic. If he had asked for a "mastera" (ruler), "alam aloah" (dry-erase marker) or "mahai" (eraser), we would have been set. Unfortunately, he was asking for something which hadn't yet come up in my vocabulary lessons. I tried to get around it by asking who it was for but it turned out to be one of the religion teachers, and that didn't clarify anything. I asked why she needed it and he pointed to his head, which only made it more mysterious. I asked if she was cold or had a headache. He said no and no.  Baffling.

We stared at each other for a few minutes, neither of us sure what to do about our predicament. Finally, he gave me the "wait one moment" hand signal (put your first two fingers together with your thumb to make a very soft fist and gently bob it up and down about three times) and ran off.

I found out afterwards that he ran down the hall and found the first teacher he could, the school administrative assistant, and asked her what the word he needed was in English. She told him and he ran back down the hallway to the office repeating the word over and over to himself.

Returning to my perspective, the boy ran back into the room, slightly out of breath and says, "rupper pand!" Unfortunately, this did not immediately clarify for me what he needed. After a moments consideration, I figured it out! Arabic speakers who are new to English sometimes have trouble deciphering between b's and p's since there is no p in Arabic. What he wanted was a rubber band. It turns out that one of the students needed to put her hair up. Ah, of course. Now if he had just said the word "shar" (hair) earlier, I might have understood... but really, who knows?

In any case, it was a good, humbling reminder that there is always more to learn.